
Class. 







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Copyright N°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



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OBLRTq rRAT OS « COYLL 



Rocks and Flowers 



Seven Discourses on the 
Apostles' Creed 



By 
Robert Francis Coyle 



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Copyright 1910 

The Fisher Book & Stationery Co. 

Denver, Colo. 



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I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker qf Heaven 
and Earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; who 
was conceived by the Holy Ghost; born qf the Virgin Mary; 
suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried; 
He descended into Hades; the third day He rose again from 
the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right 
hand qf God, the Father Almighty ; from thence He shall come 
to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, 
the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the For- 
giveness qf Sins, the Resurrection qf the Body, and the Life 
Everlasting . A men . 



©CU28320: 



Contents 

Page 

I God My Rock 5 

II That Rock was Christ . . . . 15 

III The Stone Rolled Away . . . .25 

IV The Ascension and Judgment ... 37 
V The Holy Ghost 47 

VI The Flower of Hope — Forgiveness . . 57 

VII Immortelles— The Life Everlasting . .67 



"God My Rock" 

"I Believe in God, the Father Almighty." 

FOR sixteen centuries the Apostle's Creed has been ap- 
pealed to as summarizing in masterly compactness 
the essential beliefs of all who follow Jesus. This creed 
has crossed every sea. It has seen empires rise, and flour- 
ish, and pass away. Everywhere, in every city of Christen- 
dom, and in most of the cities of heathendom, in Lon- 
don, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg, New York, Denver, and 
on every Sabbath day, wherever Christians gather for 
worship, it is recited or chanted. It carries in its bosom 
the deepest convictions and the most inspiring hopes of 
hundreds of millions of our race. It is a creed of granite 
and a creed of glory; a creed of unshakeable solidity and 
a creed of unrivalled sunshine; a creed of rock, and a 
creed of flowers. 

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of 
Heaven and Earth. ,J That is the fountain head. There we 
begin. There is not a stream of Christianity bearing 
across any landscape on earth, that does not come ulti- 
mately from that source. Pour things are affirmed or 
implied in this article. First, we affirm our belief that 
God is. This conviction is universal. Atheism is every- 
where an exception. It is like a total eclipse of the sun, 
— something aside from the regular order and exceed- 
ingly rare. If anything that has ever been attained by 
the human mind is reasonable and worthy of absolute and 
unquestioned credence, it would seem to be the conviction 
that God is. And how is this conviction driven home and 
rooted in the hearts of thinking men and women? Why 
do we believe that there is a God? Is it because the 



6 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

Bible says so? But where did the Bible get its authority 
to speak so decidedly on this subject? It would be reas- 
oning in a very vicious and absurd circle to say, "I be- 
lieve in God because the Bible says there is a God, and I 
believe in the Bible because it is inspired by God." Ar- 
gument of that sort would hardly be worthy of little chil- 
dren. Why then do we believe in God? Is our reason 
hereditary? Do we believe in him because our fathers 
did, and our grandfathers, and all our forbears for gen- 
erations back? That is an easy kind of faith, and it 
may be genuine, but it cannot be very intelligent or very 
virile or very dynamic. No, if we are well educated; if 
we are independent thinkers, and not borrowers and imi- 
tators; if we are mature in our intellectual processes, we 
arrive at our conclusions by what is called the scientific 
method. Here are certain tremendous facts; here is a 
universe and everywhere upon it are traces of mind; here 
are the most marvelous adaptations of means to ends; 
here are the most wonderful contrivances in stars and 
seas and flowers; here are machines and machineries a 
thousand times more complicated than any ever devised 
by man — all of them facts and forever in evidence. Now 
account for them, and in that accounting we are com- 
pelled to believe in God. Our minds can rest nowhere 
else. 

When I was a student in college I was very much in- 
terested in an orrery which our professor of astronomy 
had in his lecture room. It was an ingenious device for 
showing the movements of the planets of our system in 
relation to the sun. By turning a single crank moons and 
stars and satellites were set revolving in their orbits and 
about their respective centers. If any man had said that 
that orrery came into existence by chance, that it was 
not designed and made by some intelligent person, he 
would have been considered fit for a lunatic asylum. And 
what shall we say of the real solar system and of count- 



GOD MY ROCK 7 

less other systems, beyond which are far more compli- 
cated systems moving with a precision which no clock 
work of man can approach? What can we say but that 
these facts, if they are to have any adequate explanation, 
make belief in God a necessity. 

Suppose you were traveling through a desert land 
and should suddenly come upon a beautiful garden in 
the midst of which was a splendid palace. The grounds 
are laid out with most artistic skill, flowers arranged in 
attractive designs enchant your eyes, bewitching arbors 
tempt you to rest, and here and there gorgeous foun- 
tains are playing. You observe also that in the palace 
there is a vast deal of intricate and delicate machinery. 
Everywhere there are proofs of the presence and the 
handiwork of some living person. Yet he is invisible. 
You cannot see him. But notwithstanding you are abso- 
lutely sure of his existence. It would insult your intelli- 
gence to be told that garden and palace just happened 
into being and order and beauty. And is there not quite 
as much reason to argue from the facts of nature to the 
existence of some personal agent or owner? The scien- 
tific method takes the facts of the universe and seeks to 
account for them, and in so doing is driven by the very 
necessities of thought to the belief that God is. 

There is, of course an occasional mind of the Inger- 
sollian cast that says, "If postulating God accounts for all 
these wonderful facts, how are you going to account for 
God? Who made him?" But that does not frighten us. 
Let the skeptic or the scoffer, or the honest inquirer push 
the question, let him press it and repeat it and urge it 
until his head turns white, and when he finds the 
answer let him come and tell us. Meanwhile we rest in 
the belief that God is — a belief buttressed and bastioned 
by all the crowding facts of creation. The human mind 
must rest somewhere; there must be an ultimate, a final 
boundary, a ne plus ultra, and this we find in God. In 



8 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

this first article of our creed we affirm our belief in the 
personality of God. And what do we mean by that? It 
is not so easy to make it plain; nevertheless, I shall at- 
tempt it. In the ordinary relations of life we know fairly 
well what the word person signifies. Applied here and 
there to the members of society it does not seem at all 
mysterious. In our thought a person is a being that 
thinks and wills and feels and reasons and loves. We say 
IT when we refer to a principle, or to an influence, or a 
force, but always HE or SHE when referring to an intel- 
ligence. A principle cannot build a house or rule a city; 
an influence cannot frame laws and guide nations; a force 
cannot produce literature, or art, or music, or construct 
locomotives and steamships. A thousand principles and 
influences and forces cannot inspire philanthropies, or 
reforms, or any movement whatever for the uplifting of 
the world. All these things pour from the hearts of 
personalities. When, therefore certain teachers deny the 
personality of God and describe him under the vague in- 
definite name of principle they are simply blinding them- 
selves and their readers with fog. 

It requires a person to build a house, or an observ- 
atory, or a clock; can it require less than a person to 
build a universe? Tell me that God is infinite, tell me 
that he fills all space, that he is a sea that beats up 
against every shore, but take away his personality and 
you leave nothing in him that I can worship and adore. 
An imemnse IT filling all creation, cannot inspire my 
songs, and thrill my soul. If there is no loving personal 
heart, the word God can only mock and tantalize us. It 
is because we believe in his intelligence, his wisdom, his 
reason, his benevolence, as we see them written every- 
where on the works of his hands, that we believe he is a 
person and sustains individual relations to everyone of 
us. 

In this first article we affirm our belief in his Ai- 



GOD MY ROCK 9 

mightiness. It is the power of God that stays up the 
universe and keeps all its infinite machinery in motion. 
Let anyone dip into astronomy for an hour; let him read 
about the endless sweep of creation; about the millions 
and millions of stellar worlds that go sailing forever 
through the ocean of space, thousands of them so im- 
mense that this earth is but a speck in comparison, and 
so remote that all the figures in the arithmetic are ex- 
hausted in estimating their distance, — let anyone con- 
sider the heavens, and if he believes in a God at all, he 
will have no difficulty in believing in his power. 

To create such a universe as this, to hold it in the hol- 
low of his hand, to keep suns and stars and systems in 
repair, to steady them in their orbits, to order the proces- 
sion of the seasons, to sustain all life, to perpetuate the 
species, to be the fountain of all forces in earth and sea 
and sky, he must be Almighty. Nothing less will satisfy 
our thought. It is his power that causes his ideas to 
materialize, that makes the word become flesh, and gives 
effectiveness to his love. It is his power that rounds out 
and completes and gives perfection to all his other attrib- 
utes. In vain to tell us that he is infinite in justice, in 
goodness, in wisdom, if he is not also the Almighty. 
Take away his Omnipotence and all the other qualities of 
his nature are left like the sails of a ship without wind, 
like a factory without an engine, like a street car system 
without a dynamo. But there are people who say that 
"If God is Almighty, why did he not keep man from fall- 
ing? If he has all power, why does he allow anybody to 
perish? Why does he not save the whole race at once, 
and with one fell stroke annihilate all the forces of evil 
and blot out sin forever?" It is a sufficient answer to 
reply that God governs the sun and stars by his power, 
but he cannot keep the planets in their places by the 
Ten Commandments. Gravitation is his agent among 
systems and constellations; but gravitation cannot con- 



10 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

trol or even touch the mind and conscience of humanity. 
Man cannot be moved from earth to heaven as a locomo- 
tive is moved from Denver to Colorado Springs, placed 
upon a track and propelled mechanically along; he must 
be moved by motives, by hopes, by fears, by reason, by 
fact; and if he resists them all it is because something 
has gone wrong with him. In the domain of will, in the 
region of man's free agency, in the realm where charac- 
ter is made there are some things which even God cannot 
do. You can defy him to his face, you can reject him, 
you can walk down the eternal years without him. Or 
you can choose to be his child, choose to take the crown 
which he offers, choose to register your name in the 
Lamb's book of life. God's power is never used to destroy 
any man's freedom. He leaves us to determine our own 
destiny. But the best part of our subject is to come. 

In this first article we affirm our belief in God's 
fatherhood. This above all others is the one attribute in 
which he glories. Let me borrow a suggestion or two. 
If you are an artist and a friend visits you, it is the paint- 
ings in your studio that you show him. If you are an 
author you show him your books. If you are a musician 
you show him your instruments and your treasures from 
the old masters. If you are a mining man you show him 
your rare specimens from Cripple Creek and Goldfield. 
The things you value most are the things to which you 
call his attention. When one king, or ruler or prince 
visits another he is shown the arsenal and the army and 
the navy, because it is thought desirable to impress him 
with a sense of power. 

But this is where God differs from the princes and 
monarchs of earth. He has never been eager to display 
his power. He has left men to find it out through the 
slow process of the ages. So of his wisdom. Never has 
he paraded that and made a show of it. Rather he has 
kept it in the background. Inventions and the exact sci- 



GOD MY ROCK 11 

ences by which his wisdom is discovered, are compara- 
tively modern. The telescope and microscope and spec- 
troscope belong to recent times. God has been in no 
hurry to impress men with his power and wisdom and 
cleverness. But from the very beginning he has been 
eager to make known his love. He tried to show it in 
Eden, tried to tell about it through the lips of the old 
prophets, tried in one last stupendous effort to reveal it 
on Calvary, and ever since, through a thousand agents 
and ministries, He has endeavored to get the thought 
into the hearts of the people that his nature is love. This 
is what he glories in supremely, and to make it plain, 
to make it telling, to make it winning and attractive, He 
calls himself Father. 

You find the word in the old Testament again and 
again and it was constantly on the lips of Jesus. It was 
He more than any other, who taught our race to say, 
"Our Father," and it was He who illustrated in his own 
life what that word means. Seeing him we see the 
Father! How infinite in patience, in tenderness, in sym- 
pathy, in love! I read the story often. I follow the Mas- 
ter. I watch him and listen to him, and am profoundly 
moved. At every step, in every deed, in every lesson ,he 
is revealing the Father, and such a Father! 

You know what the highest and noblest fatherhood 
is as seen among men, what it does, how it suffers, how- 
it sacrifices, how it forgives. You know how it rejoices 
in a child's joy and honor, and how it is pierced by a 
child's pain and disgrace. You know what long journeys 
it will make and what long vigils it will keep and what 
toils it will endure to lay up for the children; how it can- 
not be asked too many favors or entrusted with too many 
confidences by sons and daughters; how it will put aside 
the dignity of office, the greatness of exalted position, to 
romp with the little boy or girl and lovingly enter into 
their lives; how the strong man, the cultured woman, 



12 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

stately and stiff and self-poised in general society, in the 
circle of the home abandon themselves to the little ways 
of the children and are pleased with their ridiculous 
pranks. And if love can so transform things in the re- 
lation of parent and child, blotting out the distinctions 
between greatness and littleness, between highness and 
lowliness, why should it be hard to believe that it does the 
same between God the Father and man the child? 

There are people who say it is beneath the dignity of 
the infinite God to interest himself in every phase of each 
individual man's life; that it is too much to suppose that 
my little ups and downs, my little plans and programs, my 
little shadows and lights, my toys and trinkets are matters 
of concern to him. But those who say that forget his 
Fatherhood. As a Father he counts the hairs of our 
heads. He puts our tears in his bottle. He is touched 
by every wave of grief or of gladness that beats up against 
our lives. 

If I had nothing else and could find nothing else 
Christ's picture of the certain man who had two sons 
would be enough. You know what you would do if your 
boy were gambling and drinking and going headlong to 
the devil. For a while you might be angry, you might 
think of casting him off, but if you are a true parent, your 
fatherhood would assert itself and crowd every other 
feeling aside and you would do anything, sacrifice any- 
thing, to redeem your lost boy. If for his sake it were 
necessary for you to be forbearing, to lie awake nights 
until your heart was afire with anxiety, that you should 
be reduced to poverty, mortified in pride, humiliated, 
crushed to the ground beneath the burden and the shame 
of your boy's sin, you would willingly submit to it all. 
And if at last you saw him coming home, returning to 
purity, to virtue, to manhood, no words could express 
your joy. He would be glad, but your gladness would 
exceed; it would swallow him up as a mighty chorus swal- 



GOD MY ROCK 13 

lows up a single voice. Well, that is the the description 
which Jesus has given us of God. It is the best earthly- 
fatherhood enlarged into infinity. 

"Like as a father, " says the Psalmist. "Like as a 
father," says Jesus, and all the gospel from Bethlehem 
to Calvary is an attempt to tell us what that 'like" 
means. How does a father pity his children and yearn 
after his children Find the answer in the face of that 
old man seated at the city gate. Yonder over the hill the 
battle is raging. On the issue of it hangs the old man's 
crown, perhaps his life. There is panic in the town, there 
is running to and fro, the people are filled with alarm. 
Already they see their homes in flames and blood flowing 
in the streets. In the midst of it all a swift courier is 
seen coming, then another, and another, and the people 
flock about to hear the tidings. "All's well!" cries the 
first. "Victory!" shouts the second. But with biting 
impatience the old man demands, "Is the young man Ab- 
salom safe?" and when the truth is told, he staggers up 
to his lonely chamber and breaks his heart with weeping 
and pierces the shadows with his pathetic cry, "O my 
son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God, I 
had died for thee, o Absalom, my son, my son!" 

Alongside of that set the picture of Jesus in the fif- 
teenth of Luke if you want another immortal illustration 
of how a father pities his children. It is these illustra- 
tions added to the lessons of the gospel and incarnated in 
the life of the Saviour that justify us in saying with con- 
fidence and often with rapturous joy, "I believe in God 
the Father Almighty" — The Father! Whosoever enter- 
tains that belief and realizes it as an experience and fills 
his soul with its intoxication can never yield to despair, 
and never stay in the valley and never walk in perpetual 
shadow. He will be the child of hope, the child of the 
hilltops, the child of sunshine. 



"That Rock Was Christ" 

" And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord." 

THIS is the substance of the second article of the Apos- 
tles' Creed. As a preliminary it will be proper to 
say a word about Jesus Christ as an object of study and 
a quiekener of human thought. It is no extravagance to 
affirm that nothing else has ever done so much to stimu- 
late the human mind. Wise men from the East came to 
his cradle, and ever since wise men and learned men, 
have been asking questions about him. He is a perennial 
subject of inquiry and investigation. The presses of the 
world never cease to turn out books about him. Of all 
the literature that flows from the manifold fountains of 
scholarship and culture, no other holds its own and 
thrives on criticism and maintains its interest and its 
power like the literature inspired by Jesus Christ. 

In the literary market as in every other market, com- 
petition is sharp and fierce; many of its waves are ephem- 
eral and evanescent; they live for a day and an hour and 
then pass away; but those that have to do with God's 
only Son our Lord are always in stock and always in de- 
mand. Not Oxford, not Cambridge, not Harvard, or Yale, 
or any other university has ever awakened so much 
thought or stimulated so much study, or done so much to 
give vigor and tone and fruitfulness to the intellect of 
man as the lowly Nazarene who came into a home of pov- 
erty and obscurity 1900 years ago. Indeed, these very 
universities themselves owe their existence to him. They 
are deposits left upon these shores of time by the ever- 
deepening, ever-widening river of his influence. Now all 
this means something, and the profound significance of 



16 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

it will not be overlooked by reflecting minds. It is a 
great power center that can transmit its energies to every 
part of a large city, lighting its streets and propelling its 
cars; and among men it would be a mighty power center, 
who could touch and thrill and inspire his own genera- 
tion and his own country from one end to the other; but 
what shall we say of Him whose attractive power affected 
all the centuries that preceded him and whose projective 
power has acted with tremendous force upon all the cen- 
turies since his crucifixion and upon all lands? The 
answer we shall have to find in the quarter indicated in 
this second article of our creed. To explain the effect 
we must study the cause, and looking upon the cause we 
are taken far beyond the limits of the human, — taken 
where we must needs feel the movement of the infinite. 

Our subject leads us into the region of the supernat- 
ural. It is a land whose existence a great many thinkers 
deny, and a land which a good many more refuse to con- 
sider on the ground that it is unknowable. There are 
large numbers who declare that it is impossible for them, 
without doing violence to their reason, to believe in the 
supernatural in the face of the natural law with which 
they are everywhere encompassed. Turn where they will, 
and in all the vast creation they see things moving in 
regular sequence, in undeviating order, no breaks, no 
leaps, no infractions, and hence, they conclude that the 
supernatural is only a dream of theology, and has no 
basis in fact. In some quarters there is such a pronounced 
aversion to the supernatural that men lose their temper 
in speaking of it, and have nothing but scorn and rid- 
icule and abuse for those who differ from them. 

Much of the confusion, and much of the bitterness, I 
think, comes from reading into the word supernatural 
more than belongs to it. Those who object to it most 
strenuously give it a meaning which it does not contain. 
They insist that it carries with it a violation of law, an 



THAT ROCK WAS CHRIST 17 

interference with the machinery and movements of the 
universe, which reason cannot tolerate. But what right 
have men to conclude that a thing or an event that is 
above nature is against nature; that a thing that is be- 
yond our human ken and our human experience must 
necessarily be a transgression or violation of natural law? 
The marvels of wireless telegraphy, of the telephone, and 
the graphophone, were quite beyond our human ken a 
few years ago. If any man had ventured to predict, when 
some of us were children, that dispatches would be re- 
ceived in the middle of the Atlantic ocean and daily 
papers published on shipboard far out at sea; that men 
would be talking with one another and recognizing each 
others' voices over a distance of a thousand miles; that 
singers in New York and London, long after their death, 
would be entertaining people in social gatherings in every 
part of the country at the same time, he would have 
been laughed at or pitied as a man whose balance of mind 
was gone. But all this has come to pass, not by any 
violation of law, but by a larger acquaintance with law. 

Now if things which would have been considered su- 
pernatural or miraculous a generation or so ago are seen 
to be perfectly natural today, why may not the supernatu- 
ral events alleged in the Bible, as knowledge increases, 
be found to be in perfect harmony with some higher laws, 
of which we are at the present time ignorant? The ken 
even of the most learned men is exceedingly circum- 
scribed. Their outlook is cut off on every side. Ten 
thousand things are transpiring in the universe about 
which they know nothing. Shall little children in the 
cellar presume to say what shall take place, or how 
things shall move, in all other rooms of their Father's 
house? It has always seemed to me absurd to affirm 
that a thing cannot be just because it happens to be lo- 
cated outside the circle of human experience. You say it 
is according to all human experience that if I let a stone 



18 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

slip from my fingers it will fall to the ground. Gravi- 
tation, you say, will settle that exactly as it always has 
in similar cases. But suppose the stone doesn't fall to 
the ground, suppose I shy it at some sleeper in the gal- 
lery, or at some beast by the wayside, suppose it slips 
from my hand toward the stars, what then? Has any 
law been violated? Has any natural sequence been 
broken up? Not at all. There has simply been the in- 
tervention of a higher law, and the harmony has gone 
on without a discord. 

What we call miracles or the supernatural, may be 
as entirely in accord with the order of the universe as the 
falling of a leaf, or the flying of a bird, or the running of 
a brook. I believe it is. I believe if we could see from 
the inside and from God's point of view, we would see 
that the miracles of the New Testament were perfectly 
natural events, and that in their performance no law of 
the Creator was trampled upon. The supernatural is sim- 
ply the natural doing its work and going on with its 
operations beyond the reach of our knowledge. 

Now with this in mind let us come back to the creed. 
"Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the 
Virgin Mary." Here we come right up against the super- 
natural. It is a great mystery, but men who cannot ex- 
plain the beating of their own hearts, or the assimilation 
of food and its conversion into bone and blood and brawn, 
or the production and maintenance of animal heat, or the 
marvels of eye and ear, or a thousand other things of 
common life, are acting unreasonably when they demand 
that all mystery shall be cleared away when we come to 
religion. Until our knowledge runs away into omnis- 
cience and we know even as God knows we shall be en- 
compassed with mystery and filled and surrounded with 
problems which we cannot solve — problems of the mind, 
problems of the body, problems of the universe. The 
Bible is no more a book of mystery than the latest book 



THAT ROCK WAS CHRIST 19 

of science. All Christian thinkers are candid enough to 
confess that the Virgin birth of our Lord presents a very 
serious difficulty. The ordinary laws of generation, as 
we know them, if the gospel story is true, were partially 
suspended when Jesus Christ came into the world. From 
the earliest days of the Christian era until now it has 
been the unbroken belief of the church that he had no 
human father, but was "conceived by the Holy Ghost. ,, 
There are people even among his disciples who are stag- 
gered by this item of the creed. They believe it, yet they 
are troubled with doubt. So far as I am personally 
concerned, I unhesitatingly accept the historical narra- 
tive as we find it in Matthew and Luke. I believe that 
the Son of Mary was the Son of God; that the divine and 
human met in her and from that supernatural union came 
the holy child Jesus. I believe that an extraordinary re- 
sult must be produced in an extraordinary way, or, in 
other words, that a transcendent effect must have a 
transcendent cause; and by thinkers of all schools it is 
admitted that Jesus was not only extraordinary, but alto- 
gether transcendent among men. While a true man, 
there was something so amazingly different from other 
men that reason requires us to look for a different origin. 
The gospel birth stories are certainly consistent with the 
life that followed. 

But for those who stumble over the Virgin birth of 
our Lord it may be well to point out that such a thing is 
not by any means impossible or unprecedented in the 
world of nature. The laws of biology do not preclude 
such an occurrence as wholly out of the question. Biol- 
ogists tell us that there are whole orders of creatures 
which are born from the female alone. The scientific 
name for this mystery is parthenogenesis, which is sim- 
ply the Greek word for, born of a Virgin. Birth of this 
kind is frequent in nature, and Prof. G. J. Romanes, the 
eminent authority on biological subjects, at a time when 



20 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

he would have been classed as an agnostic, affirmed that 
even in the human race such an occurrence "would be 
by no means out of the range of possibility. ,, This may 
seem to relieve the question somewhat for certain minds. 
But for myself the other way of reasoning is most con- 
vincing and most satisfying. I look at the character of 
Jesus, at his stainless integrity, at his pure and holy life, 
at the claim he made of pre-existence, and I am com- 
pelled to believe in his supernatural descent. He declared 
that he was before Abraham, that he was with the Father 
before the world was, that he came from the Father, and 
that he was sinless. If we accept these claims we can 
easily accept the virgin birth; if we deny them, then we 
must reconcile in our thinking an absolutely perfect life 
with assertions which that life must have known to be 
false. On the whole therefore it is immensely easier, and 
immensely more reasonable to subscribe to this article 
of our creed than to reject it. 

But now a word or two as to the Incarnation, for this 
great subject comes prominently to the surface here. By 
the conception of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin birth 
the "word was made flesh and dwelt among us." By the 
Incarnation we mean the coming of the divine into the 
human, the identification of God with the nature of man, 
becoming bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, entering 
into our life, forever one with us, as the Gulf stream 
is forever one with the ocean. 

"Verily he took not on him the nature of angels, but 
he took on him the seed of Abraham." 

If I cannot explain the mystery of it I can see its 
necessity and rejoice in the inspiring fact. Abstractions 
have little or no interest for the great mass of mankind. 
They are too remote from our prosy life. An occasional 
philosopher may find pleasure in them, but people in 
general want something they can appreciate. A God unem- 
bodied, existing only within the veil, dwelling within the 



THAT ROCK WAS CHRIST 21 

shadows, incomprehensible and invisible, can never in- 
spire their worship and kindle their hope. But let the 
word bcome flesh, let the Deity in human form live on the 
earth and walk among men as one of themselves and 
partake of their infirmities, and drink out of their cup, 
and offer his bosom to their weary heads, and shed tears 
when their hearts are breaking with sorrow, and hunger 
and thirst and suffer as they do, and die upon the cross, — 
let us have a God of this sort, and our love will go out 
to him as the flowers fling back their kisses to the sun. 
The Incarnation is a necessity. We must have images; 
and Jesus is the express image of God. We must have 
the concrete, and Jesus is the picture of God thrown upon 
the screen of the world, a living picture which all can 
behold and understand. What does it avail to tell us that 
we have a Father in Heaven if we cannot clasp his feet? 
What we want is a father on earth and this we have in 
Jesus Christ. 

I see no reason why anyone should be troubled by the 
mystery of the Incarnation. There is no end of analogies 
in the life and conduct of men. It is by making the word 
flesh, by translating ideas into facts, visions into tan- 
gible realities, that all civilization and all progress is 
made possible. Every hospital, every college, every 
benevolent institution, is a word made flesh. It existed 
in philanthropic minds and hearts before it took shape in 
brick and stone. The steamship, the locomotive, the tele- 
graph and the telephone, every invention is a word made 
flesh. It is an incarnation of that which was first of all 
only a thought or a conception of the brain. All our 
liberties, all our free institutions, all reforms that lift 
the world are the embodiments of ideals originally cher- 
ished by an occasional far-seeing noble-hearted man. 
They are words made flesh. Incarnation is one of the 
commonest and most necessary facts of life. In our re- 
lations to our children and to those whom we love we are 



22 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

daily translating the word into flesh, giving to the kindly 
thought, the generous feeling, a tangible and visible 
form. We do not give our children and our friends a 
written statement of our regard, or a creed containing 
our sentiments, but we reveal to them our love by incar- 
nation, by facts that can be seen and handled. 

So when we go back to the gospel and read, "The 
word was made flesh," and when we see that word living 
among men and blessing them with a thousand ministries 
we see the mind of God, the love of God, embodied, made 
concrete, brought where even a child can undrstand 
enough of it to fill his soul with song. 

But before dismissing the subject let me point out 
two or three practical lessons, suggested or clearly 
taught by the incarnation of our Lord. The first is as to 
the possibilities of our human nature. If God has come 
into it who can set limits to what it may unfold into and 
the glory it may yet attain? In the soot and dust and mire 
of an English manufacturing town John Ruskin saw the 
materials out of which opals and sapphires and diamonds 
are made. So by the incarnation, by the coalescing of 
God and man, by the fusing of the divine and human, the 
very soot of humanity may become a jewel fit to flash in 
the diadem of the King of Kings. 

I do not know of anything that should beget and 
keep alive in the breasts of men such a lofty and uncon- 
querable self respect; or that should give such a mighty 
impulse to every aspiration, and every noble hunger of 
the human heart. If God has come into our nature, 
marred and broken as it is by sin, it shows the capacity 
of that nature, shows that it can embody the eternal, 
shows that the impure drop may enshrine the sun; and 
hence it should inspire the weakest and sinfullest with a 
great hope. If God has come in sin may be crowded out, 
its tyranny may be thrown off, we may move up and up, 
taking on more and more of divine fullness until we shall 
be like him and shall see him as he is. 



THAT ROCK WAS CHRIST 23 

Then, second, the incarnation shows the infinite in- 
terest which God takes in us. What more could he do to 
manifest his love and grace? In the person of his only- 
Son our Lord He lays aside his glory, empties himself as 
the apostle says, and becomes a partaker of the life of 
men and puts his own divine resources at their disposal. 
All through the centuries preceding his advent we find 
him making gradual attempts to enter into our humanity. 
But as another has said, "the entrance was barred by 
many obstacles, and guarded by the flashing swords of 
many fiery passions and implacable repugnances." At last, 
however, through the marvelous patience and long suf- 
fering of Our Heavenly Father the door was opened that 
the King of Glory might come in. 

From the very beginning the Old Testament is the 
history of a process of incarnation; it is the story of a 
Hope, of a tremendous ideal that is struggling for ex- 
pression, and finally that Ideal comes to realization in 
Jesus Christ. 

In him God's interest in us blazes out into its supreme 
revelation; and if God is for us to such an extent as this, 
that he gladly undergoes all the humiliation of the man- 
ger and all the agony and shame of the Cross, who can 
be against us? To have the burning, loving interest of 
God at work in our behalf, and bound to bring us off 
more than conquerors, is a thought that should pull out 
every stop and turn on the full organ music of our being 
and make every key ring forth its hallelujahs. 



' 'The Stone Rolled Away" 

" On the third day he rose again from the dead." 

BY nearly all thinkers who have given serious atten- 
tion to the matter it is admitted that the resurrec- 
tion of our Lord is the key to the whole Christian posi- 
tion. What Paul saw so clearly and affirmed so em- 
phatically has been apparent ever since and must be as 
long as men are endowed with the ability to reason. 
Take away the resurrection and you take the keystone 
from the arch. Without it the whole structure of Chris- 
tianity goes to pieces. This is the miracle of miracles 
"with the truth of which," as another reminds us, "the 
writers of the New Testament affirm that Christianity 
stands or falls." 

One does not need to be a great logician, or a power- 
ful thinker to see the force of these words. If Jesus did 
not rise again from the dead he was himself either a 
misguided enthusiast or a deliberate deceiver, for he 
told his disciples that he would rise gain. He spoke of 
his coming resurrection with as much certainty as of his 
approaching death. In his wonderful table talk at the 
Last Supper he comforted his followers with the assurance 
that after his death He would come again. "After I am 
risen again," said he, "I will go before you go into 
Galilee." Testimony of this sort from the lips of Jesus 
is abundant and you can easily see its evidential value. 
To impeach the veracity of this witness is to fly in the 
face of his own spotless life and in the face of all his- 
tory. If he did not say these things about rising again 
from the dead we cannot believe his disciples, then it 
follows that men whom we cannot believe, men too false 



26 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

to be worthy of credence, have delineated the only per- 
fect character the world has ever seen. If on the other 
hand, Jesus did say these things he must have said the 
truth for with his character before us it is impossible to 
believe either that he was deceived or a deceiver. And 
with the history of the early disciples before us, looking 
at their sustained heroism, at what they suffered, at their 
stripes, imprisonments, exiles, tortures, their deati itself, 
— nothing can make us believe that they endured all this 
in support of a falsehood. The life they lived makes their 
testimony to the risen Christ unimpeachable. But more of 
this later. On this whole subject I desire to call atten- 
tion to two or three arguments which seem to me to be 
unanswerable. To my own mind they come home with all 
the force of a demonstration. 

I begin with the self-evident truth that every effect 
must have an adequate cause. Christianity is in the 
world. No one denies that. It is in every zone and clime 
of the world. Go into whatever land you choose and you 
will find this religion there. But Christianity was not 
always in the world. We turn back on history's page and 
we reach a day when it was not, except as it had a poten- 
tial existence in Judaism. Like every other great move- 
ment it began to be. Something caused it, and that 
something must have been equal to all that has followed. 
A ten-candle power light cannot fling its beams out into 
all the earth. A Mississippi cannot issue from a small 
island. For the mighty river you must have the water 
shed of a mighty continent. A little rose water forced 
from an atomizer cannot wash down the mountains. The 
rocks of Hell Gate were not rent in sunder and blown 
from the pathway of commerce by a child's torpedo. Bars 
of steel are not twisted and broken by playful zephyrs. 
The cars of a great city are not propelled by a pocket bat- 
tery. Judge the cause and measure its power, and its 
quality, by its effects. 



THE STONE ROLLED AWAY 27 

To proceed in this way is scientific. The scientist 
measures the force of the fire by the heat it radiates; the 
power of the light by the reach of its rays; the strength 
of the current by the wheels it turns; the capacity of the 
engine by the speed of the car. In the world of physics 
this method of reasoning is simple and it is convincing. 
Should it be any less in the realm of morals and of spirit? 
Christianity is an effect. It is a tremendous effect, and 
for this tremendous effect rational thought is right in 
postulating a tremendous cause. Here is an echo sound- 
ing in Africa, in Asia, in America, in the islands of the 
sea, an echo from a far-away age, issuing from a cross, 
from an open grave, and since it sounds so far and sounds 
so long what must have been the original voice? 

Here is a sceptre whose sway is felt and lovingly 
acknowledged from California to Cathay, from Alaska to 
Australia, its power growing with the flight of time, a 
sceptre whose sway began to be felt immediately after 
the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ; and if the scep- 
tre is so mighty, what must be the King whose hand holds 
it? Measure the cause by its effects. Was it a small 
thing to transform the Cross from an instrument of 
shame into a symbol of glory? The Romans looked upon 
the Cross with disdain, they loathed it, and turned from 
it with horror. The meanest, the vilest citizen of the 
Empire was considered too good to be crucified. And, 
yet, within three centuries from the death of Jesus the 
Cross was emblazoned upon the imperial standards and 
the legionaries were proud to march under it. The Cross 
was stamped upon coins. It was painted on shields. It 
was embroidered in the soldier's uniform. What was it 
that wrought these remarkable changes? What was it 
that changed the Sabbath from the seventh to the first 
day of the week? Whence has come the beneficent power 
that has dotted the earth with missions, with light cen- 
ters, with hospitals and colleges and asylums; that has 



28 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

sent angels of hope and love singing and ministering 
through the world; that has given visions of a city that 
hath foundations to those who dwell under lowly roofs; 
that has wooed wealth from the pockets of the rich, and 
mites from the pockets of the poor, and caused con- 
stantly enlarging streams of benevolence to flow through 
society; that has caused liberty to stir in human breasts 
and leap into human institutions and put upon innumer- 
able human lips the song of the free? To produce all 
these changes and set in motion all these forces, means 
power, power too enormous for words to describe. These 
changes are effects; they have been thrown out upon the 
stage of the world by some force behind. With this in 
mind consider this proposition, viz., that — 

What we call Christianity and all it has brought to 
mankind of light and hope and inspiration, must have 
come from one of three causes. In setting these causes 
before you I am simply going over ground that has often 
been gone over by others. But if we are to be strong 
and intelligent in our faith, we cannot refresh our minds 
with these great arguments too often. The three causes 
may be stated as follows, and there cannot in the nature 
of the case be more than three. 

First, we may affirm that Christianity proceeded from 
a clever fraud and that the whole structure rests upon a 
shrewdly concocted deception. 

Second, we may take the position that Christianity 
issued from a little company of weak and superstitious 
disciples who were the creatures of fanaticism and cred- 
ulity. They were honest enough but they were deluded. 

Third, we may stand with Paul and say, "Now is 
Christ risen from the dead," and maintain that all this 
mighty product called Christianity has come from the 
power of the resurrected Jesus. 

Here then are three explanations offered; and all 
that has ever been written on this subject gathers about 



THE STONE ROLLED AWAY 29 

these three, viz.: deliberate deception, innocent delusion, 
and the actual rising again of Jesus from the dead. 

Will you look at them very candidly and thoughtfully 
in their order? 

We are asked to believe in the first place that the 
original disciples of Jesus were deceivers; that they were 
playing a part which they must have known to be false; 
that they foisted upon the world a stupendous impos- 
ture. Now, we are familiar with the old and true say- 
ing that water cannot rise above its source. The proverb 
applies with no less force in the realm of morals. The 
question of Job is still pertinent, "Who can bring a clean 
thing out of an unclean." So also is the question of Jesus: 
"Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" 
A corrupt fountain cannot send forth a pure stream. Not 
only must every effect have an adequate cause, but the 
effect must partake of the quality of the cause. 

If these early promulgators of Christianity were de- 
ceivers, if they were deliberately imposing upon the peo- 
ple when they went up and down the earth preaching 
that he had risen from the dead, if they were lying and 
knew that they were lying, how shall we account for the 
lofty ethics they taught and the sublime precepts they 
inculcated? No such morality had ever before been en- 
forced. It was far superior to anything ever heard from 
the lips of Socrates and Plato. Read it in the last chap- 
ters of Romans, read it in the Epistles to the Corinthians 
and the Galatians and Ephesians. Read it in the Epistles 
of John and James and Peter, morality that moves on the 
same plane with the Sermon on the Mount, and far in ad- 
vance of the best living even of the present time. All 
this flowing from the hearts and lives of deceivers! Such 
white light shining through such dirty glass! The thing 
is preposterous. 

Then think of it in another way. They were de- 
ceivers. There was falsehood in the very springs of their 



30 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

being, and yet with this falsehood in their breasts, they 
went forth to unparalleled sacrifice, and suffering, and 
persecution, and heroism. Before the alleged resurrec- 
tion of Jesus, during the last days of the Master's shame 
and humiliation, and while the shadow of his death was 
upon them, they were in utter despair. They were weak, 
they were shrinking and timid; nay, more, they were 
cowardly. When most of all he needed their presence 
and sympathy, they were so craven hearted that "they 
all forsook him and fled," and one of them in coarse and 
vulgar profanity disavowed all connection with him. A 
more forlorn, a more crushed and broken company never 
lived. The radiant and abounding hope they had in their 
dear Lord gave place to an awful sense of failure and de- 
feat. But now note the change. After that transcend- 
ent event of the third day; after they had seen the risen 
Christ and talked with him; after the repeated confer- 
ences and interviews of the forty days, these very men 
were completely transformed. They were as opposite 
from what they had been before as noonday is from mid- 
night, as the torrent that challenges the mountain rock 
is from the shrinking pool in the valley. Now, that he 
is risen, they lift up their heads, they defy kings and 
councils, they tremble not at the maledictions of priests 
and Sanhedrims; they go into prison with singing and 
are as fearless as lions before the hate of the Jew and the 
animosity of the Roman. They welcome stripes, they 
welcome perils and privations, they rejoice in tribula- 
tion, they face death in its most awful forms without 
flinching, and all to show their devotion, their love, to 
their Lord. 

No one denies that this complete revolution in the 
spirit and temper of the early disciples took place; that 
this company of despairing fugitives were converted into 
heroes whom nothing could intimidate, and whose earnest- 
ness nothing could resist, and whose unselfish service 



THE STONE ROLLED AWAY 31 

of humanity has been the wonder of the ages ever since. 
Is it possible to believe that such dauntless courage, such 
divine self-abnegation, such mangnificent living and 
dying, came from deliberate deception? To entertain 
such a belief would be to turn reason into chaos. No 
argument can convince us that hypocrisy can flood the 
world with sincerity, or that cunningly concealed fraud 
can furnish the materials with which to build the tem- 
ple of truth, or that false-hearted men can give to the 
world the spirit of unquenchable reform and undying 
moral growth. The first supposition then must be ruled 
out. Whatever the early disciples were who went every- 
where preaching the resurrection, they were not de- 
ceivers. 

We are asked to believe in the second place that they 
were deluded, honest but weak and credulous souls who 
were carried away by their own imagination and victim- 
ized by their own fancy. According to this theory all 
that belongs to the resurrection, had its origin in the 
overwrought mind of Mary Magdalene. She had brooded 
over the Lord's death until she became hysterical and in 
her hysteria she thought she saw Jesus in the garden, 
and made all the rest of the disciples think so, too. Thus 
from the conjoint hallucination of Mary and the other 
followers of Jesus, from "their elevation of mental and 
nervous life," or in simpler words, from their easy going 
credulity and weak fanaticism came the whole story of 
the risen Christ and all the tremendous moral effect of 
it upon the world. Those who accept this theory should 
never again charge Christians with being over-ready to 
believe on insufficient evidence. Every effect must have 
an adequate cause, and to say that this whole movement 
which we call Christianity came out of hysteria may sat- 
isfy a certain class of minds; but it can never satisfy the 
hard common sense of mankind. Think of the power that 
overturned the Roman Empire, that compelled the Cae- 



32 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

sars to lay their homage at the feet of Jesus, that is 
everywhere undermining the superstitions of the world 
today, coming from such a source as that! But there are 
some who say that the delusion of the disciples was of 
another sort. They declare that Jesus did not actually 
die on the Cross and that he only seemed to rise from 
the dead. He simply swooned away from exhaustion, was 
taken from the Cross alive, restored to consciousness, and 
in due time declared to be alive again. The artless and 
unsophisticated disciples believed the latter without giv- 
ing themselves the trouble to think about the former. It 
never occurred to them to inquire as to the actuality of 
their Lord's death; enough for them that he was with 
them once more. But the absurdity of this position is 
even greater than the other. I quote a word or two in 
this connection from Strauss, the well known German 
rationalist. He says: "It is impossible to believe that 
a being who had stolen half dead out of the sepulchre, 
who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treat- 
ment, who required bandaging, strengthening, indulgence, 
and who still at last yielded to his sufferings, could have 
given the disciples the impression that he was a con- 
queror over death and the grave." But that they did 
have this impression, that it set them on fire with en- 
thusiasm, and sent them out to a world-wide propaganda, 
is a fact of history which all alike admit. Consider it 
for a moment: "A poor weak Jesus," as another puts it, 
"with difficulty holding himself erect, in hiding, dis- 
guised, and finally dying — this Jesus an object of faith, 
or exalted emotion, a risen conqueror and Son of God." 

I do not wonder that this theory of apparent death 
and delusion excites the ridicule of the keenest critics 
and thinkers on both sides of the sea. 

But if the resurrection belief did not come from de- 
liberate fabrication or from deluded fancy, then it must 
have come from actual fact; and this is our conviction; 



THE STONE ROLLED AWAY 33 

it is the steadfast conviction of the Christian Church 
throughout the world. Accept the fact as the New Testa- 
ment gives it, and the complete transformation of the 
disciples is explained; their radiant joy, their life-long 
enthusiasm, their lion-like courage, their sublime self- 
sacrifice, are accounted for. Accept the fact as the his- 
tory relates it and the whole dynamic of early Christian- 
ity, and modern Christianity, and all the rising, pulsing, 
tides of the Christian faith, are made clear to rational 
thought. Deny the fact and we are driven to all sorts of 
absurdities and compelled to resort to the wildest of in- 
terpretations. 

In all this discussion I do not mean to imply that 
there are no difficulties. God never makes the pathway 
easy for human thought. The road that leads up to the 
citadel of truth, has its rocks and its ruts and its steep 
places. It is not all smooth and level riding. But if 
there are difficulties on our side, there are far greater 
difficulties on the other side. I have touched upon two 
or three of the absurdities to which a denial of the great 
resurrection fact commits us. There are still others. Sup- 
pose Jesus died, but did not rise again, what became of 
his dead body? If his friends stole it away and kept it 
and carefully guarded it in some secret place, what in- 
spiration could they get from a dead body to make them 
so dauntless in courage? What comfort, what hope, what 
power could they obtain from a dead body? But if it is 
absurd to believe that his disciples had stolen his body 
and hidden it away, why did not his enemies produce it 
and at once and for all put an end to the propaganda of 
Jesus and the resurrection? One exhibition in the streets 
of Jerusalem of that mangled form, one public identifica- 
tion, would have strangled the new faith in its cradle. 
The only reason why they did not do it was because they 
could not. There was no dead body to produce. Jesus 
had risen. 



34 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

That is the stupendous fact and when we recite it in 
our creed we are not reciting a cunningly devised fable, 
but one of the best substantiated truths in human his- 
tory. And now just a final word as to its significance. 
The resurrection puts the crown of divinity upon our 
Lord. If he did not rise our Unitarian friends are right. 
He was only a man — and not a very truthful man, either 
— certainly not entitled to our worship, for he said re- 
peatedly that he would rise again. He called himself 
"the resurrection and the life." On that rock we stand. 
It is not fog and mist but the indestructible granite of 
history. It is practical. It strikes home. It admonishes 
and it warns. The resurrection fact says to us that the 
cemetery is not our goal, that the grave is only a way 
station, and that the interests of uncountable years de- 
pend upon whether we are heading in the right direc- 
tion. If we are running into sin and sipping forbidden 
cups, it says to us, "Pause, consider, you are to live on 
when all the stars are dead." 

But the sweetest voice that comes to us from the 
resurrection fact is one of inspiration. It assures us that 
we have a living Christ, who is with us all the days, a 
loving helper, and brother and friend. Under the cloud, 
on the steep hill, in the stress of temptation, down in the 
dark valley when the heart is breaking, — always he is 
with us. It tells us that our dead who died in Him are 
not lost, only gone on around the bend of the road. It 
tells us that those who have left us and passed through 
the gateway which we call death are far more alive than 
we are, far freer, far happier, rejoicing in the conscious 
presence of their risen Lord. Wonderful is the hope that 
blossoms out of this article of our creed, "On the third 
day He rose again from the dead." It throws its sweet- 
ness and fragrance over all our life. It inspires. It re- 
freshes. It lifts up. And not only so, but it begets within 
us a feeling of awe and solemnity. It sobers and steadies, 



THE STONE ROLLED AWAY 35 

for it shows us the majestic proportions, the boundless 
sweep of our life. Standing on the elevation of the great 
resurrection fact we see beyond the river, we see the land 
of Beulah, we see the Delectable Mountains wrapped in 
the glory of God, and standing there thoughtfully, with 
vision cast forward, all that belongs to our life takes on 
the measureless significance of eternity. 



44 The Ascension and Judgment" 

"He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the 
right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from 
thence He shall come to judge the quick and the 
dead." 

IN these great words our creed reaches its climax. It is 
a long way from the Virgin birth to the right hand 
of God the Father Almighty; a long way from the suffer- 
ing under Pontius Pilate to the supreme judgeship of the 
Universe. There is nothing higher, nothing more solemn, 
than the thoughts connected with our Lord's exaltation; 
and the scriptures link His exaltation to His humiliation, 
making one the logical basis of the other. 

The impression they make upon us is that His going up 
to the dazzling summit of God's glory turned upon His go- 
ing down to the lowest depths of earthly abasement. The 
ladder by which He climbed to the mountain tops of 
Heaven was planted in the valley of the world's shame 
and ignominy. Every one who knows his Bible will re- 
call at this point Paul's great passage in his letter to the 
Philippians, where, speaking of Jesus, he says: "But made 
himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of 
a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and 
being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and 
became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross. 
Wherefore God hath highly exalted him and given him a 
name which is above every name; that at the name of 
Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and 
things in earth and things under the earth ; and that every 
tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the 
glory of God the Father." Thus the two things, his humil- 



38 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

iation and his exaltation are inseparably bound together. 
The one without the other would have no meaning. 

"He ascended into Heaven." The Scriptural account 
is brief and simple and yet very remarkable. Luke speaks 
of the ascension twice. First in the gospel that bears 
his name, where he says: "And he led them out as far as 
to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands and blessed them, 
and it came to pass while he blessed them, he was parted 
from them and carried up into Heaven. And they wor- 
shipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; 
and were continually in the temple praising and blessing 
God." His second reference is in the first chapter of the 
Acts in which he adds some exceedingly interesting de- 
tails. Thus: "And when he had spoken these things, 
while they beheld he was taken up and a cloud received 
him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly 
toward Heaven, as he went up, behold two men stood by 
him in white apparel, which also said, Ye men of Galilee, 
why stand ye gazing up into heaven This same Jesus 
which is taken up from you into heaven shall so come in 
like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." 

The thoughtful reader can hardly fail to see in this 
story a literary touch that makes it altogether unlikely 
that this was the work of human invention. It is said 
that the disciples "returned to Jerusalem with great joy." 
Their Lord had gone. The clouds had closed about him. 
The mysterious other world had received him. He whom 
they loved with all their hearts had vanished into the un- 
known; they had looked into his face, they had listened 
to his voice for the last time, they were left alone with his 
enemies and theirs, and yet they "returned to Jerusalem 
with great joy." Is that the touch of an inventor or the 
touch of fact? As we see it in this world, when the loved 
one goes, when the dear companion disappears over the 
border, when the great heart to which we have clung 
blesses us and says farewell, it means pathos, it means 



THE ASCENSION AND JUDGMENT 39 

tears, it means sorrow. Whoever comes back from the 
place of parting where congenial souls are taken from one 
another for life, with great joy, praising and blessing 
God? 

In what book did you ever read that when some 
mighty man of God, who had won the affections of thous- 
ands, was called away, or some philanthropist whose life 
had been a benediction to his fellows was summoned into 
the unseen, or some statesman, in whom his country glo- 
ried and on whom it leaned, stepped out of the ranks of 
the living, the people were glad and exultant and went 
back to their homes and their tasks with great joy? No, 
after all such experiences we return to our Jerusalem 
with eyes that are wet and with hearts that are sad. So 
that in this literary touch we have the unconscious tes- 
timony to the truth of the story. 

And there is another equally significant. In the nar- 
rative of our Lord's birth we are told that at that great 
event the music of Heaven broke forth into the Gloria in 
Excelsis. Where the Lord God stoops to the humiliation 
of the manger, the angelic hosts are represented as sing- 
ing, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, 
good will toward men." But at the ascension, when he 
w r ent back to the right hand of the Father Almighty 
there were no songs heard by men. If there was any 
music, any jubilation, as I think very likely there was, 
it was kept for audiences within the veil. Now, if the 
story of the two events had been of human invention, if 
men under the spell of some strange delusion or for pur- 
poses of their own had tried to forge or fabricate the two 
narratives of the nativity and the Ascension, our knowl- 
edge of literature, and our knowledge of human nature 
tells us how they would have proceeded. "Over the 
cradle," as another has said, "there would have been 
silence, and a sky as hushed as the frozen sea. At the 
Ascension the air would have quivered with the melody, 



40 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

and the mountains been shaken by the storm of the tri- 
umph/' But because the narrative is true, the liturgical 
instincts of the evangelist are kept in check. The church 
is supplied with no song for the Ascension tide to form 
a counterpart to the Gloria in Excelsis. The evangelist 
who walks with such a firm historical tread through the 
Gospels and Acts, who gives chronological facts, who 
observes so carefully in the storm and shipwreck, who 
preserves and uses documents, has a mind which is desir- 
ous of veracity, which respects every attainable accuracy 
because it is of the noble family of truth. 

To the temple which he raises to the truth he will 
neither prefix a porch of romance, nor append an exit of 
fiction. Because the narrative is true, all the songs are 
for the cradle, all the silence is for the return to the 
throne. Thinking men and women will readily appre- 
ciate the force of these words. These literary touches 
are not accidental. Much less are they the work of in- 
tentional deceivers. They are here because we are dealing 
with fact. "He ascended into Heaven" as quietly as the 
sun sinks behind the horizon, and with minds illumined 
to see who he was and what it all meant the disciples 
"returned to Jerusalem with great joy." 

"And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Al- 
mighty." If the language is figurative everybody knows 
just what it means. Long ago as now and always the 
right hand is the place of honor. On the right hand side 
the host or hostess seats the guest to whom it is desired 
to show special deference and consideration. The 
prime minister is seated at the right hand of his sovereign 
or chief. The meaning of the figure as applied to Jesus 
is not only that he is now in the place of supreme honor, 
but that he is on the throne of power. That position, that 
exaltation is the realization of his own words when he said 
just before he stepped into the chariot of cloud, "All 
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." 



THE ASCENSION AND JUDGMENT 41 

And you will notice that both in the Gospel and in 
the Creed it is in the present tense. "He sitteth at the 
right hand of God the Father Almighty." That is his 
place, his attitude, today. And you will not fail to appre- 
ciate the calm reserve of power implied in his posture. 
There is no fear, no worry, no agitation, no feverish haste, 
but all the quiet tranquillity, all the patient repose, of 
one who is conscious of infinite resources. "He sitteth." 
He will bide his time. The eternal can wait. But when 
at last he rises from his throne to come again, his coming 
will shake the universe. If only we had the vision of 
Stephen; if our eyes could penetrate the mists; if we 
could see the Heavens opened and the Son of Man on the 
right hand of God, it would reassure us, and thrill us with 
a triumphant optimism in the face of the aggressive evils 
of our time. Is Jesus really on the throne of power? Is 
the sceptre of the world held by the hand that was 
pierced? Is our beloved Master sitting in the seat of 
universal dominion? Then we can afford to be patient, 
and look into the future with the most joyful expectancy. 
The mystery of iniquity may work, sin may disturb and 
fill society with vice and ungodliness, moral corruption 
may run riot, lawlessness may make patriotism weep, and 
tragedies of wickedness may cause many a good man to 
hang his head in despair, but all this is only for a while. 
The power is not there. These are only shadows. These 
are only the darkness before the sunrise. These are only 
clouds permitted to blacken the sky for a day. The real 
power is on the throne and these things will pass. The 
power of all powers is invested in our Christ, and by and 
by the earth will be swept clear of sin's shadows and 
sin's woes as the tempest sweeps the cloud rack from the 
sky, and lets the sunlight pour itself upon the world. He 
who sitteth at the right hand of God will do it. 

"Prom thence he shall come to judge the quick and the 
dead." Here we pass from the present to the future tense. 



42 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

The world has doubtless many great events yet to come. 
There will probably be imemnse changes in society 
brought about either by the slow process of evolution or 
the quicker process of revolution. Thrones will fall. Em- 
pires will pass away. Wars will devastate the earth. The 
drama of the ages will grow more tragic as it moves 
toward its culmination. Crisis will follow crisis as billow 
breaks upon the back of billow. There will be repeated 
mustering of forces, on one side the legions of light, on 
the other the legions of darkness. New orders will crowd 
out the old. Life will become more accelerated. Anta- 
gonistic principles will grapple more fiercely. And some 
day in the midst of it all, some day while men are buy- 
ing and selling, trading and traveling, competing and co- 
operating, suddenly without a moment's warning, they 
wiil hear the seventh trumpet sounding, and, looking up, 
will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of Heaven 
with power and great glory. "This same Jesus shall so 
come in like manner as ye have seen him go." No one 
can misread such words as these. Jesus is coming again. 
The future holds no other event so stupendous. 

While there are differences of interpretation, as to 
the nature and method and time of his coming, the entire 
church of Christ believes in his second advent. The early 
Christians looked for the Lord's return in their own day. 
The apostles lived and toiled in expectation of his speedy 
coming. At the end of the first Millennium there were 
multitudes who were convinced that he was at hand. So 
it has been from century to century. While it is not given 
to us to know the times and the seasons, and while Chris- 
tians reading the same Bible, differ in their views, the 
profoundly significant thing is that they are all agreed 
as to the fact. Whether pre-millenarians or post-mille- 
narians, they all believe he is coming again, and with the 
word of God as their teacher they cannot believe other- 
wise without rejecting the book altogether, for as to the 



THE ASCENSION AND JUDGMENT 43 

stupendous fact it is most explicit. The language of the 
creed is the crystallized language of the Bible on this 
subject. 

He is coming again, not this time to a manger and a 
Cross, not to the weakness of human flesh to hunger and 
thirst and suffer, not as the lowly Nazarene to be spit 
upon and mocked and despised, — not thus will he come, 
but in power and great glory. Heaven will give him back, 
but not as he was given at first. The personality will be 
the same, there will be the same love on the seat of judg- 
ment, love holding the balances of justice. He will still be 
the Lamb of God, but his mission and the expression of 
his face will be that of the bench and not of the advo- 
cate. "From thence he shall come to judge the quick 
and the dead." That means those who are still living on 
the earth at his return and those who have passed into 
the unseen. 

How much there is in the Bible about a future judg- 
ment all readers of the sacred volume know. It declares 
repeatedly that there will be a final adjudication at a 
tribunal from which no appeal can be taken. This has 
been the conviction of thoughtful men of all religions and 
of all ages. Long before Christianity came into the world 
the old pagans of Greece and Rome believed in their 
Nemesis. The thought has always prevailed that some- 
where, somehow, sometime, all things and all men will be 
brought to a final settlement of accounts. Our Bible 
names the judge, so does our creed. Both point us to 
the bar of the Son of God who is to come again. 

There is a process of judgment going on all the time 
in this world — a judgment of history we may call it. Un- 
der sentence of this judgment Jerusalem fell and great 
was the fall of it. Under a similar sentence the Empire 
of Rome came to its hour of doom and went to pieces. 
The French revolution, the battle of Waterloo, the victory 
of Sedan, the American civil war, the humiliation of 



44 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

Spain, and the defeat of Russia, still fresh in memory — 
all these are judgments of history, and declare that God 
is on the throne. 

"He hath sounded forth the trumpet 
That shall never call retreat, 
He is sifting out the hearts of men 
Before his judgment seat." 

This republic of ours is on trial. The church is on 
trial. You and I are on trial, — how we get our money, 
how we accumulate, how we spend, how we treat our 
neighbors, how we meet our obligations to the state and 
to the church, how we live and act and think, — all that 
makes up our life is being sifted out before God's judg- 
ment seat. There is a present testing as well as a final 
reward. 

But the judgment of today is necessarily incomplete. 
While men get a measure of justice here in these times 
that are passing, it is at best but partial. Indeed, some 
seem to escape altogether. They are so agile, so alert, 
and so clever in crookedness and dishonesty that the law 
cannot overtake them. Many of the sins of men never 
come to the surface in this life. They are hushed up or 
covered up, so skillfully that society knows nothing about 
them. Hence our reason tells us that the judgment that 
is going on now is not enough, that there must be a future 
tribunal where the books will be balanced and every man 
receive his just recompense of reward or punishment. 

It will be a judgment of works. The teachings of the 
New Testament leave us no room for doubt here. Not by 
our beliefs, not by our opinions, not by the churches we 
belong to, and the professions we make, shall we be 
judged, but by our deeds. Read the words of Jesus on 
this subject. If we are to have a place on his right hand 
when he sits upon the throne of his glory it will not be 



THE ASCENSION AND JUDGMENT 45 

because we were orthodox and subscribed to every article 
of the creed. It will not be because we were sound in 
the faith; but because we were kind, because we were 
unselfish, because we had hearts that could be touched 
by the needs of the poor and the sick and the lowly and 
the suffering, because we gave meat to the hungry, drink 
to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, sympathy to the 
imprisoned, welcome to the stranger, cheer to the home- 
sick and the lonely. Those who served, those who lived 
their life for others, those who incarnated the spirit of 
Jesus, those who did not seek to be ministered unto but 
to minister and were glad to be fountains of helpfulness 
and hope, to these the Judge will say, "Come ye blessed 
of my Father." It will be a judgment of works. 

The final sentence will not turn upon the social de- 
cency, or respectability, or morality of men. There are 
thousands whose integrity has never been questioned. 
Their ethical conduct is as perfect as the antique statue 
of the Apollo Belvidere — and as cold, as bloodless. They 
never owe a dollar which they do not pay. They never 
insist upon more than their pound of flesh. They are 
strictly just. If they get what is nominated in the bond, 
there is no complaint. In speech they are pure. They 
abhor smut. They despise slander. They are clean as 
the ice that is made of artesian water. But there is no 
summer in their hearts. They have no compassion for the 
man who is down and no missionary appeal ever finds 
its way through the thick mail of self-sufficiency in which 
they are encased. They have no spirit of Jesus toward 
the fallen and the weak and the castaway. They have a 
tremendous fund of negative virtues. They have never 
committed positive and flagrant deeds of sin. They 
have never given themselves up to courses of evil. But 
it is the things they have left undone that will condemn 
them when Christ comes to judge the quick and the dead. 
It is not enough that the farm should be free from weeds. 



46 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

It is not enough that the fountain should be clear of 
artistic defects that offend the eye. It is not enough that 
the fig tree should be symmetrical and well equipped 
with leaves. We cannot be satisfied with negations and 
omissions. If the farm does not bear wheat, and the 
fountain send forth water, and the fig tree yield figs, 
they are condemned. So in our human life: it is not 
enough even to be good. We must be good for something, 
— for the judgment, let me say again, is to be one of 
works. 

There will be no condemnation to those who are in 
Christ Jesus, and that for one reason, because no man 
can be in Christ Jesus without serving, without helping, 
without doing good in a very warm and tender and prac- 
tical way, to his needy fellow men. "We must all appear 
before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may 
receive the things done in the body, according to that he 
hath done, whether it be good or bad." To that last 
assize we are on our way. We need have no fear if we 
have committed our case to the Son of God, and are 
faithfully endeavoring to reproduce his life. But with- 
out him it will be a dreadful thing to stand there. From 
such an issue we cannot pray too earnestly to be saved. 



"The Holy Ghost" 

" I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic 
Church, the Communion of Saints." 

WHILE the word trinity does not appear in the 
Apostles' Creed, the doctrine to which it points is 
most conspicuous. We have God the Father Almighty, 
Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and the Holy Ghost, 
and these three we are taught to believe, are one God. 
the same in substance, equal in power and glory. Whether 
we pray or preach or lift our voices in sacred song, and 
whether we say Father, or Son, or Spirit, our hearts are 
going out, not to three Gods, but to one. The Son reveals 
the Father and the Spirit reveals the Son, and in both 
cases it is the only living and true God that is made 
manifest. 

It is a mystery which I do not pretend to be able to 
explain. I have never seen or heard anybody, or read 
of anybody, who could explain it. But God in three per- 
sons is not a particle more mysterious than God in one 
person. The Unitarian has quite as many difficulties to 
grapple with as the Trinitarian. If we are to stop think- 
ing and to stop believing where we stop understandng, 
we shall stop at this side of almost everything. We talk 
of seeing .and hearing, and feeling, and smelling. But 
no wisdom of science has ever yet got to the bottom of 
them. What is the relation between the senses and the 
personality? How is the fragrance of a flower, or the 
sound of an organ, or the glory of a sunset, or the touch 
of an object conveyed to the intelligence? Nobody can 
tell. 

We candidly acknowledge the mystery of the Trinity 



48 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

but in so doing we are only making humble confession 
of our own intellectual limitations. You and I are 
trinities. We have bodies, souls, and spirits — three in 
one. Evrey light is a trinity. It consists of a lamp, a 
flame, and an illumination — three in one. Every flower 
is a trinity, the stock, the life, and the efflorescence — 
three in one. In every thing we do there is a trinity, a 
purpose, a method, and a power — three in one. No mat- 
ter what your business, or calling, or profession in life 
may be, there is always an end in view, a method by 
which to reach it, and a power or an inspiration to urge 
you on. There is no end of trinities, so that we need 
not lack for analogies and illustrations in the great 
matter before us. When God sent his Son into the world 
he sent himself. As Phillips Brooks says, his sending 
was a coming. And when Christ sends the Holy Ghost 
the same thing is true. Every outpouring of the Spirit 
is a special manifestation of Christ. When Peter tried 
to explain to the people the marvels of Pentecost he at- 
tributed them to Jesus and said, "He hath shed forth 
this which ye now see and hear." 

"I believe in the Holy Ghost." When we say that we 
are simply affirming our belief in the one God; and 
when a man is converted, when he turns about and be- 
gins to live toward the skies, it is because of the en- 
trance of God into his life. The Spirit has come into the 
man, and the whole tone and trend of his being are 
changed. He has definitely begun to be a man of God 
and it doth not yet appear what he shall be. It is no 
easy matter to talk on this subject because to many minds 
it is exceedingly vague and shadows^ and intangible. But 
whatever we may think of it, we are bound to admit that 
our Lord and his apostles made a vast deal of it. They 
considered the Holy Spirit's presence in the church and 
in Christian work the one thing above all others indis- 
pensable; so have all the revivalists of Christian history. 



THE HOLY GHOST 49 

I say to you frankly that I cannot explain the influ- 
ences of the Spirit. They are past finding out. But so 
are the movements of the wind. We see its effect, we 
hear the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it cometh 
and whither it goeth. This, however, is no reason why 
we should balk, or turn to the consideration of something 
else. I do not know how one man can so speak or sing 
as to stir to tears, or soothe and quiet the soul, of an- 
other. I do not know how strains of music can take 
hold of a man and lift him up into an atmosphere of 
hope and joy ,or how if they are in the minor key they 
can depress him until his heart is almost ready to break. 
I do not know how the rustling of the leaves in Novem- 
ber, or the sigh of the pine tree under the touch of the 
north wind, can fill a man with a feeling of melan- 
choly. I do not know how certain emotions in me can 
awaken similar emotions in you. What is it that moves 
us to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those 
who rejoice? How does a mother pour her affection upon 
the heart of her child? How is it that some force acting 
upon us from the outer world, carries us away down into 
the valley of gloom today, or away up to the hills of light 
tomorrow? 

We cannot tell, we only know these things are so. 
But if these secret and mysterious forces of nature and 
life should so affect us, why should it be thought a thing 
incredible that God should move upon us by his Holy 
Spirit? I know of nothing more unreasonable than for 
men who live and move and have their being in mys- 
tery to insist upon having all mystery cleared away when 
they come to religion? 

But while I have spoken of the influences of the 
Spirit let me hasten to say that the Holy Ghost is in- 
finitely more than an influence, or an emanation, or a 
principle. That this is the thought of far too many is 
shown by their use of the impersonal pronoun IT in re- 



50 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

ferring to the Spirit. The Scriptures never speak so. 
Jesus never speaks so. Both the Bible and the Christ 
make use of the personal pronouns "He," "Him/' 
"Whom," when referring to the Holy Ghost. According 
to our Lord the Holy Ghost "reproves," "guides," 
"teaches," "comforts," "leads into all truth," "brings 
to remembrance," "endues with power." To say these 
things of an influence or an emanation would be ab- 
surd. The words of Jesus leave us no alternative. He 
certainly teaches us to believe in the proper personality 
of the Holy Ghost. And not only so, but he teaches us 
that as a person the Holy Ghost is co-equal with him- 
self. The Spirit comes to take Christ's place, to carry on 
Christ's work, and it stands to reason that no subordi- 
nate could do that. The man who fills Beacher's place or 
Spurgeon's place must be the equal of these princes 
among men. No mortal could bend the bow of Ulysses 
but Ulysses, and when the mighty one leaves us we must 
have some person of equal genius and calibre and power 
to step into his shoes. If that be true of men how much 
more of the Christ of God. He had been preaching as 
never man had preached. His words had thrilled over 
the hills of Judah. They called forth the unqualified 
testimony that "Never man spake like this man." When 
the day came, therefore, for our Lord to vacate his pul- 
pit who should fill it? What must be the quality, the 
temper, the capacity of the person sent to stand in the 
place of Jesus Christ? Could anybody do it who was 
his inferior? But he declares that even greater things 
shall be done because of the advent of the Spirit than 
ever he himself had done; so we can but conclude that 
the Holy Spirit is not only a person but the equal of God. 
A word now as to the sphere of the Spirit's opera- 
tions. Jesus says, "If I depart, I will send him unto you." 
Again he says, "He shall abide with you forever." Jesus 
returns to heaven, the Spirit comes to earth. When 



THE HOLY GHOST 51 

Jesus was here in the flesh the Father said, "This is my 
beloved Son, hear him." But after his ascension Jesus 
speaks out of the skies and says, "He that hath an ear 
let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches." The 
Holy Ghost, then, is here in the world as God's execu- 
tive. He is here in two senses. First, as the air which 
is universally diffused; and, second, as water which flows 
in certain channels, like our streams and rivers. In the 
first sense he enswathes every life, presses upon every 
soul, hovers about every religious assembly, and all we 
have to do is to open and he will come in. In the second 
sense he has already come in, he has poured himself in- 
to the vessel, the life, the church that has made room for 
him, so that the person or thing thus filled becomes a 
channel of blessing to others. 

I have seen water in the shape of mist hang dense 
and heavy over hill and plain. Every tree and flower was 
wrapped in it as a shroud, but its weight was not felt. 
It did not move the smallest machine, it did not sway 
a branch, or tip a leaf. And I have seen water in the 
shape of a stream sweep down the valley, turning mill 
after mill, causing wheels of industry to spin and bear- 
ing many a craft of comemrce to the sea, everywhere the 
very embodiment of life and power. Thus while the mist 
was as truly water as the stream, it was water without 
concentration, water without a channel, and therefore, 
it was weak, inoperative and practically useless. It is a 
good lesson to take home. The Holy Spirit is here and 
everywhere. He broods over the world. But he mani- 
fests himself in Pentecostal power only when you and I 
and our churches become definite channels for him to 
move in. 

Jesus said to his disciples, "It is expedient for you 
that I go away, for if I go not away the Comforter will 
not come unto you, but if I depart I will send him unto 
you." He disappears in the flesh that he may be present 



52 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

in the spirit. He removes himself visibly in order that 
he may be an invisible power in their hearts. When 
Jesus says, "If I depart I will send him unto you," his 
sending is also a coming; and hence the inspiring sig- 
nificance of those other words of his, "Lo I am with you 
always." "I will not leave you comfortless; I will come 
to you." His sending is a coming. Very soon after his 
ascension they began to find his assurances made good. 
In bodily form he was gone, but at Pentecost he came 
back in the person of his Spirit and stayed with them as 
a blessed experience and was in their hearts as a tre- 
mendous dynamic. It was this Spirit, this unseen pres- 
ence uniting them so unmistakably with their invisible 
Lord, linking them so really and so vitally to the power 
within the veil that led them to say, and has led the 
Church ever since to say, "I believe in the Holy Ghost." 

It was simply an amplification, a fuller statement, of 
their "I believe in Jesus Christ." This new presence in 
their life was nothing else than the manifestation of 
Jesus in their hearts, — a subjective, interior experience 
that filled them with joy, that set them on fire with en- 
thusiasm and made them irresistible. 

But now note the next article of our creed, " I be- 
lieve in the Holy Catholic Church." The connection with 
the article on the Holy Ghost is too close to be separated 
even by a comma. There can be no Holy Catholic Church 
without the Holy Ghost any more than there can be the 
living tree without the vitalizing sap, or a piece of hot 
iron without the infusion of fire. I am not saying that 
there may not be ecclesiasticism, that there may not be 
priests and orders and ceremonies and smoking altars, 
without the Spirit who came on Pentecost; for we have 
far too much evidence of that in the history of Christen- 
dom; but I do say that if this one indispensable presence 
be lacking there can be no Holy Catholic Church. Every 
true church is an incarnation of the Holy Ghost, very 



THE HOLY GHOST 53 

much as Jesus was the incarnation of God. I am walk- 
ing here on Scriptural ground, for the New Testament 
teaches us that the church is the body of Christ. His 
life, his blood, his will, his spirit are in it. If not, it is 
a corpse more or less decorated as the case may be. 

"The Church, " said the late Dr. Richards of New 
York, "is nothing else than the united company of all 
those who are bound to each other by this common expe- 
rience of the one spirit of fellowship which Christ be- 
stowed upon them all." 

When professing Christians stay away from the place 
of prayer and from the place of public worship; when 
they forsake the assembling of themselves together; they 
are making it impossible for the Holy Ghost to do his 
work, for he comes upon men in companies, upon men 
banded together with a common desire and a common 
aim. When the people throng the midweek service, when 
they come with one accord, with one longing, with one 
prayer, with the empty vessels turned upward, the spirit 
of God is always poured out. 

The word Catholic is borrowed from the Greek and 
is the equivalent of the Latin word universal. Too often 
when we say Catholic the minds of not a few revert to 
the Church of Rome. But the Papacy has no monopoly 
of this word. Neither has any other body of Christians, 
and whenever they arrogate to themselves the exclusive 
right to the word Catholic they are not revealing their 
breadth but exhibiting their narrowness. If they claim 
to be Catholic and at the same time deny fellowship to 
any who love our Lord Jesus Christ, they are writing 
themselves down poor blind sectarians. 

According to the Westminster Confession of Faith, 
"The Visible Church consists of all those through- 
out the world that profess the true religion together 
with their children." No matter where he lives, no mat- 
ter what denominational flag he flies, no matter though 



54 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

he be Romanist or Protestant, Conformist or Non-Con- 
formist, if tie is loyal to Jesus and seeks to do his will 
and to live his life, he belongs to the Holy Catholic 
Church. 

When we stand in the sanctuary every Lord's day and 
confess our faith in the Holy Catholic Church, we con- 
fess and declare thai our denomination is not the Church 
of Christ, but only a small branch of it; and it would be 
a very unworthy branch if we were not glad to co-operate 
with all other followers of Jesus for the conquest of the 
world. I wish we were more Catholic and more holy. 
I wish all Christians were. I wish all who name the 
name of Christ might have a right hand of fellowship and 
a spirit of fraternizing love for one another. 

The next phrase in the Creed helps to light up and 
explain what I am now saying, "The communion of 
saints.' ' Without this there can be no Holy Catholic 
Church, and there can be no communion of saints with- 
out the Holy Ghost; and so you see how the three items 
are bound together. If the saints, the holy ones, the 
saved ones, redeemed by the same blood, forgiven by the 
same infinite grace, cannot have communion with one 
another, it would seem absurd to speak of them as con- 
stituting a Holy Catholic Church. There are Christians 
who imagine that this communion or fellowship is only 
to be looked for on special sacramental occasions. But 
that is a very unworthy limitation. We are told that it 
was Peter and Andrew and James and John who first 
brought this term into Christian use, and they learned it 
from their fishing business in which they were partners. 
The "communion of saints" means the partnership of the 
saved, a partnership of service, and a partnership of ex- 
perience. Now let me say again that if any man refuses 
to come into this partnership; if he holds aloof from the 
company of the disciples; if he declines or neglects to 
identify himself with believers as one of them, he has no 



THE HOLY GHOST 55 

right to claim Christ's promise of the Holy Ghost, for 
that promise was made not to individuals standing alone, 
but to the disciples in a partnership. 

The man who keeps outside the electric system of the 
city, who does not come into the telephone family and 
have his name registered, is not going to receive the 
benefits of the current. It is ready to serve him, ready 
to bring its power into his life, but he must make the 
connection. If he stands off by himself the current will 
flash its messages elsewhere. The illustration is of 
course defective as every illustration must be, but you 
see its bearing. The Pentecostal current bears its divine 
energies into human lives only as they are in communion, 
in partnership, all with one accord in one place. 



"The Flower of Hope" 

"I believe in the Forgiveness of Sins." 

SIN exists. No man in his senses can deny it. It taints 
every life. Its black waves break over every thresh- 
old. Our politics, our courts, our business, our papers, 
our society, are full of it. In slum and avenue, in homes 
of poverty and of wealth, in religious temple and hall of 
justice, in the rush of the city and in the quiet retreat, 
in short, in all our human relations and experiences, 
there is nothing so evident and nothing more constant 
than sin. Go where you will among any people, civilized 
or barbarous, and whatever else may be lacking you are 
sure to find sin there. You will see it in their laws, their 
customs, and their lives. With the orgies of unspeakable 
vice going on in every city, with the virtue that is every- 
where being slain, with the innocent that are everywhere 
being prayed upon by the lepers of society, with the 
crimes and frauds and rascalities blazed to the world by 
the daily press, with the cries that are going up from the 
wronged and oppressed, and with all the endless traged- 
ies that are weaving their miseries into the web of hu- 
manity's life, it is scarcely less than the ravings of in- 
sanity to deny that sin is, that it is here, a most palpable 
and tremendous fact. 

The awful thing is not disposed of by soft words. In 
spite of all verbal juggling, in spite of all tricks of 
rhetoric, in spite of all attempts to bury it under aliases 
and dictionary terms, sin exists, and is every hour and 
everywhere getting in its work. It avails nothing to 
throw around it the velvet robe of illusion, or to wrap 



58 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

it in the garb of mortal mind, or to clothe it in 
all the euphonisms known to speech, for however 
covered up, its sting comes through without the slightest 
abatement of its poisonous force. The ugly, the hideous, 
the deadly thing is not changed or modified or made a 
particle less destructive, by decorating it with fine 
phrases. The viper is not made less viperous because 
Cleopatra takes it to her bosom. It kills the queen as 
readily as the slave. When one reads a certain current 
philosophy and its deliverances on this subject, and then 
looks around him upon the world, he can but wonder at 
human gullibility. We know what men do. They bite 
and devour. They slander and slay and cheat and kill. 
They pierce and cut with instruments sharper than steel. 
They mock and misrepresent and malign. They wrangle 
and war and hate. We know what we ourselves do and 
say and feel. Not one of us has made a straight path for 
his feet. Not one of us is free from regrets for things 
done or things left undone, which swarm up out of our 
past like hornets to sting us. Oh, we are sinners! We 
know it. We confess it. We are not using stereotyped 
phrases when we acknowledge our transgressions in the 
house of God, but expressing the deepest and saddest con- 
victions of our hearts. 

And in this we stand with the whole brotherhood of 
man. Sin is a universal consciousness. Explain it as we 
may, there is the fact. Wherever you find men, no mat- 
ter what the color or race or condition, you find them 
doing penance, or making confession, or seeking to pro- 
pitiate offended dieties, or manifesting in some way or 
other their sense of unworthiness. They feel that they 
have done wrong, that they are wrong, and by a thousand 
altars and sacrifices they are trying to set themselves 
right. 

It is most pathetic and it is profoundly significant. 

Man's longing to be forgiven is, I think, the most 



THE FLOWER OF HOPE 59 

moving, the most touching thing, in human history. His 
temples, his pagodas, his pilgrimages, his shrines, his 
bleeding victims offered in sacrifice, are evidences enough 
of what is in his soul. The very word priest and the of- 
fice for which it stands, point with unmistakable finger 
to this longing. 

No man of sane judgment and balance of mind is sat- 
isfied with himself. The inflated egotist or the fool may 
be, but never the wise man. As he reviews his life, as 
he lays it alongside his ideal, as he sets it over against 
the moral law and the holiness of God, he is smitten with 
a keen sense of condemnation. He has said so much that 
he ought not to have said, thought so much that he ought 
not to have thought, desired so much that he ought not 
to have desired, condemned when he ought to have been 
charitable, denounced when he ought to have been kind, 
stirred up strife when he ought to have made peace, — has 
been so sinful, so un-Christlike, so unloving, that some- 
how or other he feels that he must get things re-adjusted; 
that he must have his past reconstructed; that the dis- 
cordant notes must be struck out of his life if ever he is 
to have peace. He knows himself to be wrong, to be out 
of harmony with God, and he longs to be in tune. This, 
I say is the feeling of every sane, right thinking man. 

Moreover every man of this sort knows that he can- 
not forgive himself. If he is to get over the chasm that 
separates him from God the plank must be flung across 
from the other side. Why did not poor, broken-hearted 
Simon Peter forgive himself when he went out into the 
night and wept bitterly? Why did not Magdelene for- 
give herself and set her own life right instead of flinging 
her wreched womanhood at the Savior's feet? Why did 
not Lady Macbeth forgive herself and hush her guilty 
conscience and wash the stains from her bloody hands, 
and climb back to innocence by a ladder of her own build- 
ing? Why do not the sinners in the tenderloin district 



60 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

and the sinners on the avenue, why do not you and I 
forgive ourselves and straighten out our own record and 
balance up our own accounts and prepare our own out- 
fit for the society of God? Alas, we cannot. We are all 
alike helpless here. Our whole humanity is helpless. If 
it were not there would not be an altar or a sacrifice or 
a priest in all the world. These facts declare with an 
emphasise that cannot be mistaken that forgiveness is an 
importation. It comes over from the coasts of the in- 
finite mercy. 

In our relations to one another there is a kind of 
forgiveness, but it only needs a moment's reflection to 
show how imperfect and exceedingly limited it is. A 
thief, for example, may break into my house and steal 
my goods, and I may forgive him, I may treat him as 
though the thing had never happened, but that does not 
make him innocent. That does not take away his guilt. 
I have not touched the springs of his life. He is just as 
much a thief as he was before. I may forgive a cutting 
word, or a sharp blow, but I cannot forgive the motive 
or the animus out of which they come. A man may cheat 
me in a business transaction, or he may lie about me and 
do me immense harm, and I may go to him and say, "My 
friend, I forgive you." I may be absolutely sincere about 
it. But that has not settled the case by any means. I 
have only dealt with the outside of his life. There is an 
inner region into which I have no power to enter. After 
I have forgiven the thief, the slanderer, the back-biter, 
the rogue, the enemy, he has still to be forgiven by Al- 
mighty God. 

Now it is these things, man's dissatisfaction with his 
own character, his consciousness of sin, his conviction 
that he cannot forgive himself, and the superficial, the 
fragmentary nature of the forgiveness which he exer- 
cises toward his fellow men, that lead him to long for 
the forgiveness of God. Our forgiveness reaches only to 



THE FLOWER OF HOPE 61 

the offense, the crime, the outward act; what we want, 
what our whole humanity cries our for, is a forgiveness 
that will cleanse the inner fountain, that will utterly an- 
nihilate the nest in which the offense was hatched. 

Here, then, we come to consider God's answer to this 
longing. The longing is universal, it springs eternal in 
the breast of our race. From every quarter of the globe 
it smites upon the skies; and are those skies brass? Are 
they dumb and unresponsive? As to the lower wants of 
our nature, and as to his lower creatures, God has grac- 
ious answers for every desire, or craving, or longing. If 
the bird, when the cold north wind begins to blow, spreads 
its wings and flies away in search of a warm summerland, 
it never fails to find it. The summerland is provided. 
The instinct that impels the bee to go forth in search of 
honey for the first time, the fish to seek their spawning 
places in the cool bright streams of the north, the young 
eagle to look for the mountain crag, the duckling to find 
the pond, and the wolf the depths of the forest, is never 
mocked. God does not implant longings in the birds and 
beasts without also supplying the means of their gratifi- 
cation. So of men, on the plane of his material wants. 
God answers his eyes with light, his ears with sound, 
his lungs with air. We note the same thing when we en- 
ter his higher life. If he has a mind, the universe is 
stocked with objects to gratify his hunger. If he has 
affection which creeps out like a vine to find something 
to cling to, God has constituted the family, and estab- 
lished society and surrounded him with persons to love. 

Now if God keeps faith with the creatures of field and 
forest and sea, if he keeps faith with the dumb brute; 
if he keeps faith with man up to a certain point; if the 
desires of man's body and the cravings of his mind have 
been abundantly provided for, can we believe that God 
has left the deeper and higher, and intenser longings 
of man's spiritual nature unanswered? It is impossible. 



62 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

We are certain that He who has been so lavish in antic- 
ipating the less important needs and instincts of his in- 
ferior creatures and of man, has been even more lavish 
in his provisions for the moral hunger of those who bear 
his own image. Man wants forgiveness. The whole earth 
is full of the pathos of his cry to be freed from transgres- 
sion and set right with the infinite holiness. It is the 
most persistent hunger of our race. Every religion is an 
attestation of it. And if there were no answer; if all 
idols, and all altars, and all crucifixes, and all houses of 
prayer have been set up in vain, then life is a riddle in- 
deed, and man is the most deceived, the most defrauded 
being under the stars. 

But thank heaven we are not driven to such a per- 
plexing alternative. Grace and not granite is on the 
Throne. The sceptre is in the hands of the Eternal Love. 
The government is on the shoulders of the everlasting 
Father. He has made provision like the God he is. It 
has in it all the bigness and all the fullness of His own 
heart. "Be it known unto you therefore, men and breth- 
ren, that through this man is preached unto you the for- 
giveness of sins. ,, There you have the program of re- 
demption. 

And there you see what forgiveness COSTS. Turn 
the word about if you would get at the pith and marrow 
of it. It is a giving-for. At the very heart of it there is a 
cross. No man can forgive in any deep and true sense 
without suffering crucifixion. There are people who ob- 
ject to what is known as our sacrificial theology. They 
don't like it and sometimes condemn it in terms that are 
severe and bitter. It seems to them unreasonable and un- 
worthy of God that forgiveness should be made available 
for sinners only by the way of Calvary. There are some, 
indeed, that go so far as to declare, that the sacrifice of 
the innocent to clear the guilty is fundamentally immoral. 
Bronson Alcott, the famous teacher of boys, did not think 



THE FLOWER OF HOPE 63 

so. If one of his boys broke a rule and became a trans- 
gressor, instead of inflicting the penalty upon the lad, 
the great school-master took it upon himself. He held 
out his hand and insisted on taking the blow, or the lash, 
deserved by the boy. It was the innocent suffering for 
the guilty and so far as I know no critic ever called it 
immoral. On the contrary Bronson Alcott's method of 
dicipline was everywhere admired; and it is said that 
there never was such order as there was in his school. 

If our Bible teaches that forgiveness costs blood, so 
does our human experience. Try it for yourselves and 
see if it does not slay your pride, and put self upon the 
rack, and cut to the very quick of your life. Some man 
in the city has wronged you; he has assailed your integ- 
rity; he has sought to tarnish your good name; he has 
robbed you of that which money can never replace, and 
done you the greatest injury which one person can do 
to another. If hate were ever justifiable you would be 
justified in hating him. Now go to that man, forgive it 
all, forget it all, hold out the hand of reconciliation, and 
see if it does not cost blood. 

To forgive small offences is hard enough, and far too 
few ever do it in a genuine way; but to forgive wrongs 
that are glaring and conspicous and most damaging is 
something that cuts to the very core of the heart. It 
means humiliation, it means agony, and that is just the 
reason why it is not more common. The easy thing, the 
natural thing, is to strike back, to resist the injury, and 
to be vindictive. It takes heroic stuff, it takes Christlike 
stuff, to go to our enemy and make at-one-ment with 
him, really forgive him, and restore him to favor. It 
cannot be done without a GIVING-FOR, without laying 
ourselves upon the cross and taking a certain amount of 
the shame and the sorrow of his sin up into our own lives. 

But you say, does not parental love forgive a prodigal 
son without any such cost or suffering? No, it does not, 



64 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

it cannot. The bad boy comes back from the slime and 
filth of sin, back from the very gates of hell, back, a 
shattered and miserable wreck, and is welcomed with 
boundless joy. There are no words of chiding, no scold- 
ing, no reproof, but with a flood of tears father and 
mother fall upon his neck and kiss him. There is for- 
giveness, full and absolute, but read the cost of it in that 
mother's white head and in the great lines of sorrow in 
that father's face. The forgiven boy does not know, he 
never can know, the agony they have endured, or the bit- 
terness of the cup they have drunk for him. If they had 
not suffered; if they had not loved; if their heads had 
not frosted under the awful chill of their grief, the home- 
coming would have had nothing in it for him. I am only 
saying what chimes in with our human experience, when 
I say that forgiveness anywhere in any of the relations of 
life, in business, or in society, or in the family, means 
the laying of our hearts upon the cross. 

Now if human love must suffer in forgiving, and if 
love in human hearts is the same in quality as love in 
God's heart, why should it seem a thing incredible that 
God should suffer in forgiving? Is that which is noble 
and heroic and sublime in an earthly father or mother un- 
worthy of our Father which is in Heaven? The cross is 
God's heart-break for human sin; it is God giving pardon 
to the prodigal at the expense of his own infinite shame 
and humiliation; it is God laying himself down in the 
dust of the world, as Henry Ward Beecher somewhere 
puts it, that every poor sinner may walk back to the land 
of forgiveness over his pierced breast. How any man can 
find fault with that or be unresponsive to such an appeal, 
is more than I can understand. 

But here we should be careful to get hold of the fact 
that God's forgiveness of sin does not mean remission of 
penalty. When through the Crucified sin is pardoned, it 
involves a change of character, a new spirit, a new life- 



THE FLOWER OF HOPE 65 

purpose, but the harvest of the old sowing still remains. 
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," is a 
law which is not abrogated by the atonement. The man 
who gives himself up to appetite and passion and to a life 
of wicked indulgence for thirty or forty years, and then 
casts himself upon the mercy of Jesus may indeed be 
saved; that gospel we love to preach; but while the man 
has been converted, the effects of his former living are 
with him still and always will be with him. There is 
forgiveness at the foot of the cross for every transgres- 
sion, but the cross will never give back to a man the years 
he wasted in debauchery. 

David was forgiven, but the sword never departed 
from his house. The child of his guilt died, and across 
every sunny day there flitted a tormenting shadow. A 
black and bitter memory continued to haunt him. Mag- 
delene may be forgiven, every stain washed away, but 
Magdelene can never escape the loss of her early purity. 
That improvishment goes with her forever. The roue, 
wno is worse and lower down than she, may be forgiven, 
i ven he may be made white in the blood of the Lamb, 
out that whiteness will never make up for his past. He 
will be a poorer soul, a smaller soul, as long as eternity 
lasts, because of the sensualities in which he once reveled. 

I rejoice in a gospel that can save a dying thief just 
swinging into the eternal world; that can save the worst 
wreck that was ever flung upon the rocks of iniquity; but 
let us not imagine that such a man is freed from the re- 
sults of a long life of sin and crime. He must take with 
him the emptiness of the life he has wasted. By the cross 
we have the forgiveness of sin, but the cross does not let 
us off from the natural consequences of wrong doing. The 
man who lives to himself for three score years and ten 
and then turns unto God in penitence and tears, may be 
forgiven; the Father will take to his heart the white 
headed prodigal as gladly as the youthful prodigal, but 



66 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

the man who returns to God in the sun-setting will al- 
ways be less, always be smaller, than if he had come in 
the morning. It is something, indeed it is a great thing, 
to get inside the gate of salvation at all, just inside, saved 
so as by fire, but it is an immensely greater thing to be 
counted worthy by long years of faith and consecrated 
service, to pass on to the very center of the city of God. 
Now perhaps you are saying, or thinking, if forgive- 
ness of sin does not mean remission of penalty, if it does 
not save us from the consequences of our folly, of what 
use 13 it? Why talk so much about pardon and sing so 
much about it, if it leaves punishment behind? Because 
forgiveness means at-one-ment, it means reconciliation, it 
means harmony between God and man, it means an inter- 
play, a reciprocity of love, it means fellowship, it means a 
peace of soul, because the sting of guilt is gone. I have 
sometimes illustrated It in this way: A child disobeys his 
mother. He runs off from the house and gets severely 
bruised and hurt. Then bleeding and sore he hastens 
back, or is carried back, and is at once forgiven. The 
hurt is still there; the smart remains; but is it not in- 
finitely easier to bear it in the mother's arms and in the 
sunshine of the mother's love than it would be to bear it 
alone and under the frown of her displeasure? So sin 
must be punished, but it is one thing to bear its punish- 
ment ourselves, to carry it in our lives, to feel its sting 
in separation from God, and an immensely different thing 
to bear it under the warmth and tenderness of his sym- 
pathy while carried in the arms of his love. 



"The Life Everlasting" 

"The Resurrection of the Body and the Life 
Everlasting." 

NEARLY all men believe in immortality. There are few 
anywhere that are convinced that death ends the 
whole story. When Col. Ingersoll's brother was dying, 
he whispered, "I am better now," and commenting upon 
it at his funeral the great agnostic said, "Let us believe 
in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that 
these dear words are true of all the countless dead." 
Standing by the open grave of his brother he gave utter- 
ance to this, "In the night of death hope sees a star and 
listening love can hear the rustle of a wing." But while 
mankind in general believe in immortality, and while the 
vast majority readily subscribe to the phrase, "the life 
everlasting," there are multitudes in the church and out 
of it who doubt or deny the "resurrection of the body." 
It seems to them a very material doctrine to wrap up 
with a spiritual life, and they feel that it should be ex- 
punged from the Creed altogether. 

Now there are two or three things that need to be 
cleared up in our thinking upon this subject. Go to the 
gospel narratives of the resurrection and read them once 
more. Follow the story with critical attention and see 
how careful it is to affirm not once nor twice, but repeat- 
edly, that Christ's body rose again from the dead. In 
Jerusalem when he appeared to the eleven on the morning 
of the third day, and they were affrighted supposing him 
to be a spirit, he said, "Behold my hands and my feet, 
for a spirit hath not flesh and blood as ye see me have." 
There was something about him immensely different from 



68 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

what they had been accustomed to, and yet there before 
their eyes was the old familiar figure. Eight days after 
this, to Thomas the doubter who declared, ' 'Except I 
shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust 
my hands into his side, I will not believe," Jesus said, 
* 'Reach hither thy finger and behold my hands and reach 
hither thy hand and thrust it into my side, and be not 
faithless, but believing." Later, on the shores of Tiber- 
ias he emphasized the fact of his bodily resurrection by 
dining with his disciples on the beach. It is not easy to 
believe that a spirit can eat bread and fish. For my part 
I do not see how anyone can deny that Christ rose in the 
body without denying the Gospels. 

Besides it should be remembered that it is manifestly 
absurd to talk of a spirit resurrection. The very word 
resurrection implies the raising again of that which was 
dead, and as the spirit is not subject to death, it is of 
course a misuse of language to say that the resurrection 
is spiritual. Jesus said, "All that are in the GRAVES 
shall hear his voice and come forth," and as the spirit is 
never put in the grave, it can only refer to the body. 

But I thoroughly appreciate the difficulty with which 
many are troubled here, and I shall try to deal with it 
candidly and sympathetically. When I say, "I believe in 
the resurrection of the body," many honest and thought- 
ful people immediately ask, "Which body? The body 
a man was born with or the body he died with? The 
body of his youth, or his maturity, or his age? Which 
body? " It is a well known fact of science that these 
bodies of ours are constantly changing. In the particles 
which compose them, they are entirely different from 
what they were a few years ago. The material constit- 
uents of these bodies will be gone in seven years from 
now and other material constituents will be in their 
places. It is as though the house should be wholly re- 
built while the shape remains the same. And yet that 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 69 

is not a good illustration, for in the case of the body 
more than the shape remains; the very scars remain. You 
may be three score years and ten. If so your body has 
undergone ten complete changes, it has been built over 
again with new material ten times, but the mark left by 
a wound received in your childhood is there still. 

The truth is we wear certain articles of clothing longer 
than we wear our bodies. It is something like this: Here 
is the river flowing by, and it was flowing by a thousand 
years ago; it will be flowing by at the end of another mil- 
lennium, — the same river and yet not the same. The 
drops of water which are in it today, are not the drops 
which were in it yesterday, and those which it will carry 
in its bosom tomorrow, will be new and different from 
any which it ever carried before; but always, year in and 
year out, the river retains its identity. It is so with our 
bodies. The stream of material particles flows on; they 
come and they go; but in spite of all changes our bodies 
are recognized as the same. You see then, that what we 
call identity is something entirely independent of same- 
ness of substance. When we say, "I believe in the resur- 
rection of the body," we are not affirming that the new 
body will be composed of the very dust that was laid away 
in the grave, but that it will be the same organism, in- 
formed by the same vital principle. All that the scrip- 
tures teach, all that we avow when we repeat this article, 
is that we are to have a body after death, and that it will 
be identical with our present body. Men may raise ques- 
tions and they may load them down with ridicule. They 
may ask whether the babe is to rise a babe; wether the 
tottering old man is to rise with his decrepitude; the crip- 
ple with his lameness; the fat man with his obeseness; 
the thin man with his leanness, and by such questions 
they may imagine that they have shown the Christian 
belief on this subject to be untenable and absurd. But 
when they do that they are reading into the Creed and 



70 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

into the Bible their own foolish and preposterous inter- 
pretations. 

Here is our position, and it is the position of all who 
intelligently subscribe to this ancient document which we 
have been considering. As my body today is identical 
with the body I had fifty years ago, so my resurrection 
body will be identical with the body I have now. It is 
not a question of material particles but a question of or- 
ganism. The vital principle, the organising principle, 
which gives me my identity here and preserves it abso- 
lutely through all changes, will give me my identily there 
and preserve it forevermore. Read Pagan literature if 
you would see what the future meant to the polished old 
heathen of Greece and Rome. It meant a world of shades, 
of disembodied spirits, a joyless, miserable existance, 
from which the unhappy victim longed to escape and re- 
turn to the realm of earthly life. Without bodies, un- 
clothed, flitting about as mere phantoms. "Thin as the 
idle breezes and like some dream of the night." As Vir- 
gil puts it, they passed their days in a sort of shivering 
despair. 

Higher than this the best thought of paganism could 
not rise, as to the life beyond. No wonder they shrank 
from it with fear and felt no inspiration of a lofty hope 
as they looked over the border. If we may believe their 
great poets the very anticipation of it chilled them with a 
sense of dread. It was awful to think of existing without 
bodies, without shape or form, as insubstantial spectres, 
or shadows. 

How immeasureably grander and more satisfying is 
the teaching of Christianity. It assures us that there is 
a "spiritual body" as well as a "natural body," that we 
shall not be unclothed when we pass within the veil, 
but "clothed upon;" that when the earthly house of this 
tabernacle is dissolved, when the material investiture of 
our present life is stripped away, we shall have a build- 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 71 

ing of God, an investiture suited to the new environment 
into which we have been transferred; that the Lord Jesus 
will "fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it 
may be conformed to the body of His glory." As human 
beings we should never forget that we are constituted, 
not of mind alone, nor of spirit alone, but of body, mind, 
and spirit. These three make up the man, and if you will 
read the eighth chapter of Romans, you will see that the 
body not less than the immaterial part of our nature is 
included in the redemptive work of the Son of God. 
"Know ye not that your bodies are temples of the Holy 
Ghost?" and if at dissolution these temples are taken 
down, it is only that better ones may be reared for His in- 
dwelling. It is our bodies that determine our identity 
here, that differentiate us, that make us cognizable, and 
it will be our bodies that will identify us there. 

But the bodies of our resurrection life will be glori- 
fied bodies. They will be immaterial, and yet not so sub- 
limated and etheral as not to be substantial entities. They 
will be without the physical organization of flesh and 
blood, all mere animal functions will be left behind, they 
will be free from all disease and waste and decay, they 
will be incorruptible and immortal, in a word, they will 
be what the apostle calls spiritual bodies. 

These spiritual bodies will be like the body of the 
risen Christ, superior to material law, living above it, 
always obedient servants of the spirits they enshrine. 
When Paul thought of it and spoke of it he said, "Behold, 
I shew you a mystery." He was modest enough to say 
that he knew in part, that he saw through a glass darkly, 
but for him and for us, across the mystery, there falls 
light enough from the lamp of revealed truth to warrant 
us in repeating with an accent of hope and of triumph, 
this article of our Creed. "I believe in the resurrection 
of the body." 

And now the final clause, "The Life Everlasting." To 



12 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

this summit we have come, and standing there we feel 
the tonic, the invigoration, of the world beyond. Standing 
there and looking out over the landscape that stretches 
away across the divide into the sunrise that makes the 
horizon radiant with the coming glory, we see the things 
that are made possible for us and get some glimpses of 
the grandeur to which we may yet attain. "The Life 
Everlasting" — it is a great ending to a great Creed. I 
feel that it were better sung about than spoken about, 
for on heights like these music is always more at home 
than speech. The singer can do more for us here than 
the preacher. 

Take the word "life" as it stands alone and put the 
emphasis there for a moment. It suggests brightness, and 
hope, and joy, and purity, and strength, and overflowing 
vigor and health. Simply to exist, to be, to eat and drink, 
to wake and sleep, to perform certain animal functions, 
is not to live. To dig and delve, to make bargains and 
sell goods, to swing like a pendulum from home to office 
and office to home, to wear out one's years accumulating 
substance for other people to spend, to drudge and toil 
and consume one's energies in the monotony of business 
and of the various professions, is not to live. Much less, 
is it life to give one's self up to sin, to drink from the 
cup of iniquity, to wallow in the mire of vice, and to eat 
the juiceless husks of the swine. The harlot exists, the 
roue exists, the bloated debauchee exists, the hard-hearted 
tight-fisted miser exists, but existence is not life, any 
more than a decayed and leafless trunk is a living and 
beautiful tree, or than a bundle of dried up thorns is a 
bunch of roses. Existence is a dry river bed with banks 
destitute of verdure, and channels strewn with offal and 
debris; life is the bounding mountain stream, singing 
down the valley, rejoicing in the sweet purity that sets 
the sun and stars as jewels in its breast. 

Something infinitely more than mere existence is 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 73 

meant when we say, "I believe in life." It lifts the 
thoughts to the high, the holy, the satisfying, up to God 
himself. Jesus said, "I have come that ye migh have life 
and that ye might have it more abundantly." To see 
what that means we must look at the Speaker. He did 
not own a dollar, He did not have a roof to cover Him. 
The pleasures of the flesh, the pleasures of the table, the 
pleasures of society were nothing at all to Him. The 
things for which men struggle and contend and compete, 
never gave Him a thought. Not that He was an ascetic, 
or sour anchorite, or dyspeptic solitary, for he often 
mingled in the social circle and was glad to do what he 
could to promote innocent social joys. But at the same 
time His life was not there. He had meat to eat and in- 
spirations to enjoy of a vastly higher sort than these. 
How full of life He was. He was like a river that is al- 
ways overflowing its banks. In His breast there was a 
peace that passed all understanding. In Him was life. 
Out of every avenue of His nature the life poured. Wher- 
ever He went, in whatsoever company He moved, men 
felt the touch, the thrill, the power of the life that pulsed 
through Him. And it was powerful, it was resistless, be- 
cause it was so unselfish, so heavenly, and so constantly 
played into by the life of God. Now it is the life imparted 
by Him in which we believe. 

And this life is everlasting. "God hath given to us 
eternal life and this life is in His Son." It is going on 
now, it will be going on tomorrow and going on forever; 
going on as the stream goes on gathering breadth and 
depth and volume as it flows. Beginning hera, by the 
conception of the Holy Ghost, it will be continued without 
break or interruption, as long as Christ continues. Be- 
cause He lives we shall live also. Everlasting — there is 
no coast line to that. No danger of ever running upon 
the shallows of the other side, for when we have sailed 
for a million years, we shall only be starting. Everlast- 



74 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

ing — imagination in her wildest flights can never get be- 
yond its border land. I think of it and am staggered. My 
brain reels. I am bewildered. I send out my fancy, and 
send it out as Noah sent the dove from the ark and it 
comes back exhausted, with wings drooping and weary 
from the long, long flight, only to say that the life ever- 
lasting stretches on and on into the infinite. 

And yet if the thought falls faltering on its very 
threshold there is something wildly intoxicating in the 
very conception of a life that is to last forever. Nay, not 
simply to last, but to grow, to unfold, in knowledge, in 
capacity, in love, and in holy endeavor. Forever moving 
along a pathway of light; forever expanding in excel- 
lence and glory; forever receiving new accessions of 
power; forever adding to the fullness of manhood. That 
is what it means. Stars will fall, the suns wax dim, the 
fashion of the world will pass away, but still, as God's 
child I shall be climbing. Ages and milleniums, and 
cycles will come and slip away, but still I shall be climb- 
ing, mounting up, passing from summit to summit, in the 
eternal progress. That is what it means — this life ever- 
lasting. 

Here we are hurried; the days are too short to carry- 
out our plans and accomplish all we have in mind and 
to realize all our dreams and desires. There are a thous- 
and things we would like to do, but we lack the time. 
Some of us would like to give a century or a millenium to 
the study of astronomy and to finding out the secrets of 
the stars, but we haven't time. Some of us would like to 
spend a few hundred years in the study of physical science 
and in acquainting ourselves with all the manifold laws 
and forces of nature, but there isn't time. Some of us 
would like to master all languages, and all literature, 
and all art, and all mathematics, and all philosophy, but 
there isn't time. Some of us would like to give ourselves 
for at least a thousand years to music that we might learn 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING 75 

its possibilities and get nearer to its sources of power, 
but we haven't time. So of theology. What a world 
there is there to be explored. So of countless other sub- 
jects, if only we were not so pressed for time. 

But there will be time enough by and by. The day 
will come when we shall no longer have to count the 
hours and watch the clock and the setting sun and hurry 
home before the shadows fall. We shall not feel that in 
five years, or ten years, our powers will fail and our work 
be done; but we shall wake up some morning to the fact 
that ours is the life everlasting and that before us 
stretches an eternity of fadeless youth. Then we shall 
sit down with other ransomed souls like ourselves by the 
crystal river and talk and plan and think till our hearts 
are satisfied. Time enough for every study, every jour- 
ney, every love. Time enough to acquire every accom- 
plishment, to cultivate every friendship, to develop every 
power, to bring every faculty to perfection. That is what 
it means — this life everlasting. 

' 'Leisure to fathom the fathomless, leisure to seek and 

to know 
Marvels and secrets and glories eternity only can show; 
Leisure of holiest gladness, leisure of holiest love, 
Leisure to drink from the fountain of infinite peace 

above." 

And now finally let us calm our minds with the as- 
surance that these fundamental positions of our faith will 
stand. For two milleniums they have resisted every at- 
tack and emerged unscathed from every storm of criti- 
cism. And history will repeat itself. The assaults now 
being made upon the Creed in Germany and by an oc- 
casional Dr. Crapsey in England and America will go the 
way of all their predecessors. The shafts of the assail- 
ants, whether shot from within or without the camp will 



76 ROCKS AND FLOWERS 

fall splintered and broken to the ground while the fort- 
ress of granite will remain. The waves of opposition will 
beat up against the rock and be flung back in clouds of 
spray, but the rock will stand, and into the very clouds 
of spray the sun of God's love will braid rainbows of 
promise. The Creed will stand because its stones have 
been cut from the quarry of the Bible, and the Bible will 
stand because at the very heart of it is the Rock of Ages. 



LBJMI 



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